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Jewish World Review June 13, 2012/ 23 Sivan, 5772 Obama's 'fine' mess By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The 1990 Italian film "Everybody's Fine" is one of the most depressing films I've ever seen. Starring the late It turns out that the kids are all doing badly, and the whole trip is drenched in nostalgia and regret for what might have been. When the father gets home, he can't bring himself to tell his wife the truth, even though -- the audience discovers -- she's been dead and buried for years. In the last scene, we see the old man at his wife's grave, reassuring her, "Everybody's fine." Listening to President Obama's defenders spinning his claim that the "private sector is doing fine" reminded me of those kids and their dad, all afraid to admit everything's not fine. One common defense: He was just being ironic or sarcastic.
The only problem: There's pretty much no evidence that's how Obama meant it. In his news conference last week, Obama 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 Two things are going on here, one substantive, one political. Substantively, Obama 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 Politically, however, this is a very hard sell. As we've seen in 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 Obama'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 So he's stuck claiming he's done everything right, and the only problem is the
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