What would Mitt do?

"Republicans in Congress appear persistently uninterested in passing something that could allow the economy to grow fast enough to make Obama the favorite for reelection"  

Jonathan Chait

PJ: The shock and sickening display of partisan stalling in the US Congress is contemptable. The almost gleeful delight about poor jobs reports read on every conservative blog, mouthed by every GOP politician and heard daily by the Fox News crew is frightening. Do they care more about laying blame than participating in solutions? They are happy to jump up and blame the President for every stall in the recovery while fighting against every initiative that he has presented that will help the economy. Do conservatives really want to be in power so much that they are happy to see the economic recovery falter? Are they happy to refuse to compromise on their ideology even if that compromise is for the betterment of the citizens of the US?

Playing politics when so many people are suffering should be punished...at the polls.

For a related story read  The Insane Scenario Unfolding Before Our Eyes by Jamelle Bouie  

                          "The single most important thing we want to achieve 

                             is for President Obama to be a one-term president." 

                                                    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
 
http://prospect.org/article/insane-scenario-unfolding-our-eyes 

New York Magazine

Springtime for Romney

• By Jonathan Chait

 

Flowers are blooming, birds are chirping, people are being fired...

Last month, I concluded from the weak jobs report that the economy still didn’t appear weak enough to make Mitt Romney the favorite. But times are changing fast. Today's weak jobs report suggests, at best, that the accelerating growth of winter was yet another false start and, at worst, that the recovery threatens to stall out completely. Even if the economy does pull out of its spring swoon, it could be sucked right back down by a terrifying implosion in Europe. Disaster is in the air, and some Americans are already skipping to the part where they feast upon human flesh.

Is there anything President Obama can do about it? Substantively, no. He has an economic plan — the American Jobs Act — but Republicans in Congress appear persistently uninterested in passing something that could allow the economy to grow fast enough to make Obama the favorite for reelection. Imagine that!

Obama’s fallback is to go back to emphasizing the fact that he has a plan that Republicans refuse to enact. In his speech today, Obama is reemphasizing the proposals that he introduced last fall.

This opens Obama up to the charge by Mitt Romney that he simply hasn’t gotten his plan passed, so it’s time to vote in somebody else. This counterattack will probably work well: Voters, and especially swing voters, have very little understanding of how divided power works, and they tend to simply attribute all results to the president.

It’s worth keeping in mind, whether or not it has any political force, that Romney is not offering a plausible solution to the crisis. If you define an economic plan as a proposal to do things that are a specific response to the crisis and not just long-term changes that he would favor under any economic circumstances, then Romney has no economic plan. His plan is to benefit from the short-term business cycle in order to implement long-term policy changes that Republicans would favor even if the economy was humming along.

For the complete article:
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/06/springtime-for-romney.html