National Review Online has convened a panel to respond to the president’s jobs speech last night. Here was my response:
Let’s get this straight: The president, now in his third year in office, is worked up with righteous indignation because Congress hasn’t done enough on jobs. Really?
During his first two years in office, he had commanding majorities in the House and Senate. He could have passed just about any kind of economic agenda he wanted. What did he do? He passed an $800 billion stimulus bill that didn’t work and then spent a year and a half passing the most controversial and burdensome entitlement expansion in half a century. That’s pretty much the entire Democratic economic agenda.
Now he has the audacity to suggest that Congress is to blame for not doing more? And, in the middle of yet another highly partisan presidential lecture, that anyone who opposes his failed approach to job creation is somehow doing so for partisan reasons?
That kind of speech may make the president and his partisan supporters feel better for a week or two, but it won’t produce bipartisan legislation that might actually help the country. What the president should be aiming for is real results for voters. That’s the only thing that can save him now. Instead he chose more partisan posturing. The result is that he will almost certainly go into 2012 with the worst economic record for a first-term president in modern history. Good luck with that.
You can read the whole panel here.