Rolling Downhill Since Jan. 20, '09
Election '12: Nearly half of Americans think they're worse off now than they were when Barack Obama was inaugurated. Will GOP challengers start giving him the treatment Ronald Reagan gave Jimmy Carter?
'Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Reagan asked in his closing statement in the only debate of the 1980 presidential election.
"Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we're as strong as we were four years ago?"
These simple questions put in stark relief the tragedy that was the Carter presidency.
More than three decades later, we find ourselves again suffering through another destructive presidential term. And as in 1980, the public knows who's to blame.
A Bloomberg poll taken June 17-20 found that 44% of Americans believe they're worse off today than when Obama took office. Only 34% don't believe it. Bloomberg also found that 66% of Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction, a percentage similar to what the IBD/TIPP Poll has shown for more than a year now.
Clearly, this administration needs to be limited, as the Carter presidency was, to four years. If it's allowed to go beyond that, the damage wrought by this "transformational" president will take years to repair.
Reaganesque zingers should work well throughout the 2012 race, but the real campaigning and debates are far into the future. Rather than wait until then, the opposition should go on the offensive now. Besides trying to distinguish themselves from one another, the Republican contenders all need to run, for the good of the republic, against the president now.
The task should be easy. This administration simply can't get the economy moving with its Keynesian policies and hard-left positions. The Republicans have a lot of material to work with. A few examples:
• Unemployment, at 7.6% the month Obama took office, is now 9.1%.
• Gross domestic product has grown a mere 0.8% in the 13 quarters since the recession began in December 2007. The average in past recoveries over that same time frame is 9.9%, according to Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal.
• The number of private-sector jobs has fallen by 2 million since Obama was sworn in.
• Nearly half — 46% — of the 6.7 million unemployed have been without work six months or longer, the highest percentage since Washington began tracking these data in 1948.
• Single-family home prices fell in March to their lowest level since April 2009.
• Gasoline prices are down a bit from a recent spike, but at $3.56 a gallon Friday they're still far higher than they were when Obama took office and a gallon was only $1.80.
• On this president's watch, the U.S. dollar has weakened. The dollar index, 86.216 on Jan. 20, 2009, had fallen to 74.35 by Friday, a drop of more than 12%.
• The federal debt is exploding. It is now at $14.3 trillion, about 70% of GDP. Before the $838 billion Obama stimulus became law, federal debt was 36% of GDP.
• The portion of Americans on food stamps, at 14.4%, hit a new high in April. The rate in the first days of this administration was 10.5%. That's roughly a 37% increase in two years.
These are not signs of effective stewardship. Granted, President Obama inherited a recovering economy. But the recession ended five months after he moved into the White House — and he has succeeded only in stifling progress.
This ruinous record should be the focus of the campaign not only in 2012, but this year as well.
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