Schultz: Obama Has Turned Economy Around

Schultz: Obama Has Turned Economy Around

From her appearance on NBC’s Meet The Press:

Priebus, Wasserman Schultz, Santorum, roundtable

June 12, 2011

MR. GREGORY: [8:30 minutes in] All right. Well, let’s talk more, let’s talk more about the economy in some more detail. This is the president’s standing in terms of handling the economy in the public’s eye, and it’s pretty negative right now. 60 percent almost, 59 percent, disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy. And there are facts that back that up that are difficult for this administration and for the Democrats: unemployment’s up 25 percent since Inauguration Day for President Obama; the debt’s up 35 percent, over $14 trillion; a gallon of gas up over 100 percent, with gas $3.75, higher than that in certain parts of the country. [9:00 minutes in] Why should Americans trust Democratic governance right now on the economy, and particularly the president’s?

REP. SCHULTZ: Because we were able to, under President Obama’s leadership, turn this economy around. When President Obama took office…


MR. GREGORY: Whoa, whoa, let me just stop you there. Clearly, the economy has not been turned around. I mean, you just saw those numbers.

REP. SCHULTZ: It, it certainly–it has…

MR. GREGORY: Americans don’t believe that’s the case.

REP. SCHULTZ: Well, we, we were–when President Obama took office, the month before he was inaugurated, the economy was bleeding 750,000 jobs a month, David, and we were not headed in the right direction. Now, I know we–and President Obama has said we have a long way to go. We’d like the pace of recovery to, to, to be picked up. But we have definitely begun to turn the economy around. You, you fast-forward two and a half years later now, and the economy has created 2.1 million private sector jobs, a million of those jobs just in the last six months. We’ve had 15 straight months of job growth.

MR. GREGORY: Nobody believes that you can throw–nobody believes that the pace of job creation is anything close to robust enough to lead to, to economic growth…

REP. SCHULTZ: Including…

MR. GREGORY: …even to match the economic growth projections that this administration’s made. I want to get Chairman Priebus on this.

MR. PRIEBUS: David, the chairwoman’s living in fantasyland. We know that the facts are the facts, and we can’t get away from that. And Barack Obama is defenseless to the truth on what’s going on in the American economy. We have lost as–two and a half million jobs since Barack Obama’s been president. And of that two and half million jobs, almost 45 percent of those people have been out of work for six months. That number, that number rivals the Great Depression.

REP. SCHULTZ: And yet…

MR. PRIEBUS: This, this president has been a disaster to this economy, and that’s why, when you ask Americans whether or not they’re better off today than they were three or four years ago, they say no. When you ask Americans, has this president followed through on his promises to cut the deficit in half by the end of the first term as he’s promised…

MR. GREGORY: Yeah.

MR. PRIEBUS: …the answer is no. The debt is out of control. He’s on pace to accumulate more debt on his watch than every single president before him combined.

The Democrats could not have picked a better spokesman for their party. Ms. Schultz is so far out of it, she doesn’t even know she is out of it. Just like her party.

Even Anthony Weiner has a firmer grip on reality than she does.