Obama resets the goal post for his timulus

Karl Rove:

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.

When it came to the stimulus package, the president and his administration promised, in the words of National Economic Director Larry Summers, "You'll see the effects begin almost immediately." Now it's clear that those promised jobs and growth haven't materialized.

So Mr. Obama is attempting to lower expectations retroactively, saying in an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post that his stimulus "was, from the start, a two-year program." That is misleading. Mr. Obama never said if his stimulus were passed things might still get significantly worse in the following year.

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%.

That quarter began on July 1, and unemployment is now 9.5%, up from 7.6% when Mr. Obama took office. There are 2.6 million fewer Americans working than there were on the day Mr. Obama was sworn in. The president says now that unemployment will exceed 10% this year, and his advisers say it will remain high through much of next year.

Earlier this year, Mr. Obama assured us that most of the stimulus money "will go out the door immediately." But it hasn't. Only about 7.7% of the stimulus has been spent in the six months since its passage, and more of it will be spent in the program's last eight years than in its first year. So now the president claims he said something different. "We also knew that it would take some time for the money to get out the door," Mr. Obama said in his weekly radio address on Saturday.

...

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.

...

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell wrote about words used in a "consciously dishonest way." "That is," Orwell wrote, "the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different." Americans are right to wonder if their president is using his own private definitions for the words he uses to sell his policies.

Orwell is describing what I call the politics of fraud. Usually it is the failure to disclose a material fact, and in this case it is combined without assertions that were unfounded. Obama may have thought that the bill would keep the unemployment rate from increasing to its current level, but such assertions were liberalism faith based rather than rational extrapolations. When they did not work out Obama comes back and says something different about the effects of the bill which has been a massively expensive failure.