The impotent 'stimulus'

Jack Kelly:

Shortly after a Quinnipiac University poll reported July 7 that President Barack Obama's job approval rating in Ohio had fallen 13 percentage points in two months to 49 percent, the White House dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to that crucial swing state to defend the administration's efforts to deal with the economic crisis.

This was a mistake, for two reasons.

The first is that almost every journalist reporting on the vice president's speech would feel compelled to reference the Quinnipiac poll. This, noted Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, was like "hanging a lantern" on the problem.

The second is that Joe Biden is a motormouth, liable to say anything. The White House slapped him down after Mr. Biden said on ABC's "This Week" program July 5 that the administration had "misread how bad the economy was." (When asked about the remark, Mr. Obama said there wasn't a misreading, just a lack of information in the early days of his presidency.)

Speaking in Cincinnati to a crowd of "about 200," some of them protesters, Mr. Biden asked for patience. "Remember we're only 140 days into this deal," he said. "It's supposed to take 18 months."

This isn't what Mr. Obama and his aides were saying in February. Back then we were told the $787 billion stimulus bill had to be rushed through Congress to keep unemployment from rising to 8 percent.

"No one in the House read that bill because the urgency was such that the president said we had to act now and if we acted now, we would stave off job loss and we'd get America back to work," recalled Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., the GOP whip.

At an elaborate signing ceremony in Denver Feb. 17, Mr. Obama said the stimulus bill would "create or save" 3.5 million jobs, starting right away. He also said then that he expected to be held accountable for the results.

With unemployment in June at 9.5 percent, and with the president himself now acknowledging the unemployment rate is likely to exceed 10 percent before year's end, it's pretty bizarre for Mr. Obama to say, as he did in his radio address July 11, that the stimulus bill "has worked as intended."

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I would say if they intended this out come, it is an admission of fraudulent intent since it is not what they said when they were rushing its passage. What they also fear admitting to is the failure of liberalism that is embedded in the failure of the stimulus bill. It was a bill that packed the liberal wish list into one big bill that was too long to even read.