Our Summer of Despair
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Although the White House has been touting its "summer of recovery," 2010 will actually be known as the "summer of despair."
President Obama's serial vacationing and golfing while Rome is burning will come back to haunt him and fellow Democrats this November and beyond.
His behavior shows a lack of compassion, understanding and leadership. His constant rhetoric that the economy is improving is nonsense. The people know better. It is not.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}This administration has ruled out of ideology instead of reality. They have manufactured a "crisis" on health care when we had an honest to goodness crisis on the economy that they have neglected and ignored.
Americans are asking themselves, what good is affordable health care in 2014 when I do not have a job to pay for it in 2010?
The president and his administration have been aloof to the economic problems of the everyday American. They have done what they have wanted to do instead of what the American people needed to be done. They passed 2,000 page bills that no could have possibly have read before voting on them. They have grown government and increased the national debt in record proportions and they made promises that have not been kept.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Remember the stimulus bill? The president promised that if the 1,500 page, $787 billion bill was passed, our national unemployment rate would not exceed 8 percent and that millions of jobs would be created. We now know that by the president's own standard of success, that bill was a complete failure. Unemployment topped 10 percent after the bill was enacted and still hovers around 9.5 percent nationally. Billions of stimulus money remains unspent and Americans are asking themselves, where are the jobs?
The numbers tell the tale. The U.S. Commerce Department is revising second quarter GDP figures from a 2.4% to 1.4% growth or lower. We now know that sales for existing single-family homes have dropped 27% to their lowest levels 11 years. Home foreclosures continue to mount at alarming rates as do personal and business bankruptcies and credit card defaults. Economists like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini from NYU are admitting that the economy is not recovering and that there is a 40% chance America will experience a "double-dip recession."
The Democrats are the party in power. They control it all -- the House, the Senate and the White House. It is their watch. It is their record. It is their fault.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}America don't despair, help is on the way. It's called the midterms. And it will be November before we know it.
Bradley A. Blakeman served as deputy assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001-04. He is currently a professor of Politics and Public Policy at Georgetown University and a frequent contributor to Fox News Opinion.
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