Adam Serwer writing on Greg Sargent's Plum Line:
Today’s jobs report is terrible. While the Republican response borders on self-parody, the White House has shown a complete lack of leadership on the issue.
Republicans reiterating the same talking points day after day is one thing. What’s worse is that the White House has not only failed to rebut the GOP’s arguments on spending, it has practically endorsed them. As Paul Krugman writes today, rather than pointing out that cutting spending right now means shedding jobs and further slowing the recovery, the White House has embraced the idea that spending is the problem.
The most generous interpretation of the GOP’s support for the Bush tax cuts is that Republicans actually believed their own rhetoric that massive tax cuts would lead to growth, even though they didn’t. Bush had few if any critics on the right contesting that basic point. Obama, by contrast, could have benefitted from the many people on the left warning from the beginning that Obama’s stimulus alone was insufficent and that the economy wouldn’t recover without more spending to create jobs. But Obama and his team simply didn’t listen.
