Floridians are leaning toward Mitt Romney over Barack Obama,
according to a new poll. A lack of jobs seems to be the key reason that the president's approval ratings are now at 38 percent in Florida. Since more than a million of the Sunshine State's working-age residents seeking a job can't find one, that concern is no surprise. But given Romney's job-killing history, you would think they …
But, of course, that history isn't getting the media pounding it deserves. Not that this would necessarily change minds. A majority of Florida voters did, after all, elect Republican Rick Scott to the governorship. He immediately rejected $2.4 billion in federal high-speed rail money that would not only have put the state on the map for getting with the 21st Century, but also generated 23,000 jobs. Moreover, the Republican-dominated state legislature passed and Scott signed a bill that cuts the length of time a resident can receive jobless benefits in Florida to as few as 12. There's a term for that. It's called kickin' them while they're down.
Yet this is the party—Mitt Romney's party—that an increasing number of Floridians seem to think will fix the economy? Has anyone seen my barf bag?
It's true Democrats haven't made the kinds of proposals they should have on jobs. And they didn't seek the amount of funding they should have either. Neither of those efforts would necessarily have managed to get enough congressional votes to become law. But just making such proposals, good, solid, New Deal/Great Society-style, traditional Democratic proposals would have put them into even sharper contrast with Republicans. The latter, in case you're like those forgetful Floridians, have stood in the way of improving the economic situation for rank-and-file Americans every step of the way.
Whether it was accepting the stimulus package or extending jobless benefits, all but a handful of Republicans have pretended that the most crucial factor blocking economic recovery is the tax burden on the richest people in the nation and on corporations who seem to give raises to CEOs based on how big a portion of their workforce they can lay off in any particular quarter. Well, not just taxes. They also pretend deep concern about the national debt, which the GOP has done such yeoman work in creating, in great part because the more debt the better chance they have of destroying big hunks of the nation's public sector. All part of Grover Norquist's long war against government.
To be sure, the White House has not done a fantastic job in battling Republican plans of still more prosperity for the rich created by imposing still more austerity on the backs of grandma, the poor and the dwindling American middle class. That austerity is killing the "recovery." Indeed, there is altogether too much Democratic acquiescence in the face of the relentless GOP message that deficit spending rather than the job deficit is the nation's biggest economic problem. But Mitt Romney to the rescue? Seriously, Florida? Is buyers' remorse simply unheard of there?