Dems new narrative: The economy has recovered; welcome to the new normal.
Over the weekend two Democrats made essentially the same point: the recovery has gone as far is it can go. Speaking at a fund raiser in Wisconsin, Vice President and Stimulus Sheriff, Joe Biden, announced that “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.”
Separately, Democratic Rep. Jim Moran from Virginia made a very similar and bold statement to Chris Matthews: “In fact, in the last six months more jobs were created than Bush was able to generate in eight years, Chris. People don’t understand that, the economy has recovered.“ Of course, this is a blatant distortion of what those outside of Washington like to call “facts.” In fact, Bush created 3 million net jobs (not including the ephemeral “saved” jobs). Given that Bush ended his term during a recession, this is an bad, but not negative number. So far, Obama has lost 2.2 million jobs. The last I checked, 3 million is greater than negative 2.2 million.
Of course, the more important thread here is that the Democrats seem to be repositioning themselves on the economy. Team Obama originally promised a net increase of 3.5 million jobs thanks to the stimulus. Now, Biden and Moran appear to be leading the charge on the “new normal:” 10% unemployment; growing public employment over higher paying private jobs; wasteful spending without accountability.
The net take home of all of this (apart from few jobs), is, if you were expecting things to get better, you better gird your loins.