True North

Now that people are upset that the $787,000,000,000 stimulus bill didn't "create or save" the 4,000,000 jobs that President Obama once predicted, the Obama administration is shifting gears. Their latest strategy might best be titled "If at first you don't succeed, rewrite recent history." Karl Rove's latest WSJ column highlights President Obama's tactics:

So what's a president to do when the promises he made about his economic stimulus program fail to materialize? If you're Barack Obama, you redefine your goals and act as if America won't remember what you said originally. That's a neat trick if you can get away with it, but Mr. Obama won't. His words are a matter of public record and he will be held to them.

President Obama hadn't been challenged on his flip-flops prior to getting to the big stage. He certainly wasn't challenged by the Illinois media. He certainly wasn't challenged by the DC media. Now that he's graduated to the big leagues, though, center-right bloggers and especially Jake Tapper will keep him honest. Relatively speaking of course. Mr. Rove will certainly hold him accountable:

In February, Mr. Obama said this about the goals of his stimulus package: "I think my initial measure of success is creating or saving four million jobs." He later explained the stimulus's $787 billion would "go directly to...generating three to four million new jobs." And his Council of Economic Advisors issued an official analysis showing that the unemployment rate would top out in the third quarter of this year at just over 8%.

President Obama is pretending that ARRA "has worked as intended." Unemployment has jumped from 7.6 percent to 9.5 percent, a 25 percent increase since the bill's enactment and since we aren't close to 4,000,000 jobs being saved or created or a combination thereof.

If the plan has worked as intended, then isn't it a pretty worthless plan? I mean, didn't the American people vote for President Obama with the hope that he'd solve our economic problems? I'm betting that the American people didn't hope he'd enact policies that caused massive job losses and that wouldn't jumpstart the economy. I'm betting that they wouldn't agree with President Obama that ARRA "has worked as [they] intended."

As is Mr. Obama's habit, he has answered his critics by creating straw-man arguments. In last weekend's radio address, he attacked detractors as those who "felt that doing nothing was somehow an answer." But many of Mr. Obama's critics didn't feel that way. They offered, and Mr. Obama almost completely ignored, constructive ideas to jump-start the economy.

For example, House Republicans offered an alternative recovery package of immediate tax cuts and safety-net measures that cost half as much as Mr. Obama's stimulus program. Republicans have also calculated that their plans would have created 50% more jobs than the stimulus. They reached that estimate by using the same job-growth econometric model that the president's Council of Economic Advisors used for the stimulus.

There's a reason why President Obama's JA ratings have dropped. People don't trust him like they did when he first got in office. Too often, President Obama has promised people things that he's later failed to deliver on. That's the shortest path to a credibility problem that I can think of.

President Obama's first 6 months in office is marked with lots of stumbles and few successes for the American people. If that doesn't change soon, Democrats will have to defend President Obama's revisionist history during the 2010 campaign. Good luck with that.

Comments welcome at LFR.

---

Share this TRUE NORTH article with your social network now!