COMMENTARY | It is fine to grumble and groan in a politically advantageous way, to throw yourselves back in mock shock at your thoughts of the ineffectiveness of President Obama’s American Jobs Act, but it begs the question: Republicans, where is your plan?
If you take a moment from the crowing over GOP wins in two special elections, perhaps you will notice the citizens of this country, your constituents, the very people who pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to fix their problems, not your own, are in dire straits. The number of Americans living in poverty is at a 52-year high, and what, exactly, are you doing to fix it?
Political strategy does not put food on the table. It doesn’t pay the rent, and it certainly doesn’t tend to the sick.
Unless you are a politician, of course. Then politicking can earn you a tidy sum.
It seems the Republicans are so focused on dismantling what they perceive to be the myth of Obama, of taking him apart bit by bit by bit so they perhaps can finally understand his draw, that they have forgotten they actually have constitutionally mandated jobs, as well as obligations, to the American people. The human people. Not the corporate people. The human ones, who are starving and losing their places to live and demoralized. Those elected to ameliorate the situation would rather point fingers and scoff than take any action whatsoever to help those voters who gave them those nice political jobs in the first place.
The economy is not about Obama. The economy is not even about you, Republicans, though you love to cite it and talk about it, dangling it and fitting it into nice chunks of rhetoric.
The economy is about the veterans lucky to return home with their lives after their service to the country and a country unwilling to honor that service, unwilling to create a system that gives our war heroes a credit in a rocky job market for risking their lives for us. Instead, we deem it fine that veterans cannot find jobs, cannot support their families, after being at war.
The economy is about the persistently unemployed, now job-search lepers with more and more companies refusing to consider candidates out of work. Some hope for these Americans dissolves into no hope as it becomes clear they will not find jobs. Without a reason to reverse itself, the trend will only continue.
Unemployment numbers are not political cannonballs designed to rip holes in the poll numbers of the president. The numbers reflect real Americans, squeezed and overextended and stressed and running out of options. They are the result of a complex combination of more than a decade of financial hocus pocus across many arenas, not the result of the political pull or non-pull of one man.
So, one last time, Republicans: Show us your plan.