The Private Sector is doing just fine.... NOT!

[Warph]

                      

In his news conference last week, Obuma argued that the private sector isn't holding back the economy, the public sector is.... hence "the private sector is doing fine."  When given the opportunity to retract his gaffe, he basically repeated it.  "It's absolutely clear that the economy is not doing fine," the piqued president said.  "That's the reason I had the press conference." (Something's wrong when you have to explain why you had a press conference.)

Why is the economy "not doing fine"?  Because, he explained, the public sector isn't keeping up with the private sector: "Now, I think if you look at what I said this morning and what I've been saying consistently over the last year, we've actually seen some good momentum in the private sector."

And when CNN's Candy Crowley asked Obuma senior advisor David Axelrod three times on Sunday for a yes or no answer to the question "Is the private sector doing fine?," he refused to offer anything like a retraction.  "It's certainly doing better than the public sector," he said on his third try.  Simply: There's been no retraction.

Two things are going on here, one substantive, one political.

Substantively, Obuma believes that we can save the economy... or at least his re-election efforts..  if we open the sluices of more federal spending (with money borrowed from China) and devote it to hiring a lot more government workers.  Basically, it's stimulus 2.0 (3.0, really, since Bush had a stimulus too).  Obuma, as he correctly insisted, has been saying this "consistently."  As The Weekly Standard's Jay Cost notes, that the president needs another round of payoffs to his own base is a sign of Obuma's weakness.

Politically, however, this is a very hard sell.  As we've seen in Wisconsin and California, lavishing more borrowed money on public sector workers is less popular than asking them for some shared sacrifice, particularly among independent voters.

More important, the private sector isn't doing fine.  The only reason the unemployment rate is as low as it is, is that millions of Americans have lost hope that it's worth looking for a job.  You can't have the weakest recovery in generations and the highest sustained unemployment rate since the Depression and say the private sector is doing fine.

Actually, you can say it; it's just that no one will believe you.



And that's Obuma's real dilemma.  He can't concede the private sector is doing badly because:
(1) he wants to burden it even more to spend more on the public sector, and
(2) if he admits the private sector is still doing badly, he's conceding the heart of Mitt Romney's charge that Obuma has failed economically.

So he's stuck claiming he's done everything right, and the only problem is the GOP's refusal to lavish more money on state governments.  And nobody in his family of advisors and supporters has it in them to tell him otherwise.  

It's like he's talking to a tombstone marked "Obuma Campaign 2012."

Time to step down, Mr. President!