So, here’s the big question of the moment. When did the recession start? If you listen to former Massachusetts governor and GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney it started January 2009. Now obviously, the current recession began long before Barrack Obama became president, but according to Mitt, while speaking at CPAC this weekend, President Obama is at fault for the country’s current economic fall, and has been since before he was sworn in.
Romney used numbers during his “please I want to be the president” speech that were less than factual, and his staff directed reporters and pundits covering the annual conservative love fest to monthly job data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which they claim clearly shows that from January 2009 to January 2011, the number of jobs lost totaled nearly 4 million. However, the same data set shows the economy actually started losing jobs nearly 12 months before Obama took the oath of office (during the Bush/Cheney administration) – for a total of 2.3 million jobs. So, in other words boys and girls, the Romney people are deliberately misleading people on “the facts”. They are lying.
Romney’s staff begins its estimation of jobs lost beginning with January 2009 (when 820,000 jobs were lost) as part of Obama’s total, but President Obama took office on January 21, so he was president for roughly one third of the month, meaning the other two thirds belonged to Bush. If you move January to the pre-Obama period, where those figures belong in the total numbers of jobs lost, then the job losses are about 3.1 million before he took office and 3.1 million after he took office. In other words, the economy had already been driven off of the cliff. And who drove the economy off of the cliff? If your first guess was Willy Coyote and Bullwinkle Moose then while you were close, but you don’t win anything. The daring duo of economic and foreign policy missteps was none other than Bush/Cheney. You remember? The guys who “stood watch” over the worse terrorist attack on American soil, and who then launched the country into not one, but two, wars without paying for them, meaning, without raising taxes, and who then ruined not only America’s voice on the stage of world politics, but catapulted the nation’s economy into a refuse bin?
Not only were 3.1 million jobs lost before the President took office, some 2 million jobs were lost in the first three months of Obama’s presidency, long before any of his own policies had begun to take effect. And while it’s sort of true Romney doesn’t quite blame Obama, he doesn’t place blame where it belongs either. He just sort of allows his audience – vehement anti-Obama mouth breathers to begin with – to just follow him where his “facts” are taking them.
Romney’s litany of “facts” however lacks something vitally important to those not already willing to vote for him, context; and while four million is an impressive number, it is much less impressive when measured against the overall number of people employed. The GOP-Tea Party always measures everything, and everyone, against its collective hero Ronald Reagan; and while it may be true job losses during the first two years of Reagan’s presidency were fewer, when measured against the number of employed when both men took office, both saw a decline of roughly 2.3 percent in the first two years, or basically the same total. That’s if you use monthly job loss figures, as Romney’s people did in preparing his speech, and as Romney did in delivering it. When anyone who doesn’t watch FOX PAC, or listens to the daily dose of deliberately misleading right-wing radio pabulum, runs Reagan’s number using the same scale Romney attempts to hold President Obama too – the total number of people employed from month to month, guess what? Reagan actually fares worse than Obama, percentage-wise. Yes, it’s true; Reagan’s job losses were just as bad, if not worse, as Obama’s have been.
While Romney’s statement is “technically correct”, because it lacks any context, it’s meaningless. He – like all the other GOP hopefuls’- attempts to place blame upon someone who isn’t at fault. He attempts to attribute job losses to President Obama which arguably belong solely to Bush. The eventual problem with this type of strategy is, while your band of listeners is likely to never check your figures, when you use numbers, without the context, someone will come along and put it all together, and when they do you might soon discover the guy you’re trying to emulate, your hero Ronald Reagan, actually had the same – if not worse – poor showing in job losses during his opening term. Romney has started off his next run at the White House from a position of loose figures and poor context, attempting to mislead the electorate. Not a solid place to start a campaign from.
The Liberty Tree 