Campaign ’12 / Point-Counterpoint Will Unemployment Be the


Dems Will Argue It Would


Be Worse Under GOP


HE ISSUE OF UNEMPLOYMENT HAS NOT BEEN discussed all that much recently, yet it is the millstone around President Barack Obama’s neck as he begins his re-election campaign. With the jobless rate at 9.2 percent and with the economy having added only a net 18,000 jobs in June, it is simply untenable for the president to go into a re-election campaign without any clear strategy to create jobs, even if it’s a strategy that does not seem to be offering a clear path toward immediate success. The administration initially thought that after the stimulus, the economy would right itself, jobs would be created, unemployment would come down, and the president would be able to argue credibly that he had turned around the dire economic situation that he inherited from George W. Bush and the Republicans. That doesn’t seem to be the case.


T


With unemployment having risen to 9.2 percent, and the president having acknowledged what everybody knew, which is that the stimulus produced far fewer “shovel ready jobs” than anyone expected, it is the lack of a jobs creation strategy that puts the Democrats at great risk.


I have long argued that the most comprehensive and effective strategy for the Democrats is one that couples a payroll tax holiday for employers and employees with more liberal expensing of capital expenditures on a more permanent basis than we have now. Sadly, the Democrats have yet to adopt such a strategy except on a temporary basis as part of their ongoing negotiations with Republicans over fi scal issues. It is absolutely clear unless the president comes up with a better strategy than the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness chaired by General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and the “innovation and entrepreneurship” strategy he unveiled in January, it will be very diffi cult


38 NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011


Blue State View By Douglas Schoen


for him to make a case that he has done anything about the most important problem facing the country. That said, there is another path to be taken, and it is what I suspect the White House is planning. They will argue credibly, as far as the polls are concerned, that things were worse under George W. Bush, that George Bush far more than President Obama, is responsible for creating the long-term, seemingly structural, unemployment problem.


The Democratic case will effectively be “If you don’t like the Democrats, indeed by the end of this campaign, you are going to dislike the Republicans even more.” This suggests that the campaign will be vitriolic and negative, that ideas that will unite and revitalize the country will take a back burner to the current partisan attacks we have seen recently in Washington. On one level, this is just politics, and that is OK. On another level, with the United States’ position in the world declining, with our fi scal challenges getting more serious each day, and with unemployment at 9.2 percent and indeed closer to 16 or 17 percent when you add in discouraged workers and underemployed workers, we are ultimately in the throes of a crisis that shows no signs of resolving itself, with neither party having a plan to address the large scale issues facing the country.


Douglas Schoen is a political strategist and Fox News contributor. His most recent book is “Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System.”


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