Is it a surprise that Mitt Romney, a guy worth several hundred million bucks, who
made big money laying people off as a businessman and went on to destroy jobs as a governor, has no more clue about unemployment than the average Republican in Congress has about what constitutes a middle-class income? Don't answer that.
While his own ignorance in the matter is expected, you would think his advisers would have a better grasp of the subject since it's what they're paid to do. Obviously they do not. The most recent evidence is their decision to spotlight Ryan King of Midland, Mich., to blast what they're labeling the "Obama Misery Index" in a video ad. In an interview, King, who just graduated in business administration from Northwood University, bemoaned the fact that life is tough at a time when so many people are looking for work, and said he buys baloney and bread because it's cheap:
Frustration is the big word. Anything that I'm qualified for, you know, that people are looking for, they also want experience, And I mean, because of the economy and the way it is there are so many people that are looking for jobs. But at the same time my hands are tied ... how am I gonna get experience if no one will hire me in? ...
Is it my fault that I can’t get a job? To a certain point, you just start losing faith in yourself.
Even in the best of times, of course, the got-to-get-a-job-to-get-experience-to-get-a-job syndrome is frustrating. Almost everyone can identify with that. But as misery goes, it's pretty small potatoes. And as Greg Sargent discovered, King's story is not quite what we're led to believe in the ad.
For one thing, King was identified in 2009 as the vice chairman of the Midland County Young Republicans. Could that possibly have had anything to do with why he was chosen as the posterboy for the Romney campaign's assault?
According to King's Facebook page, on June 9, the day the Romney campaign videotaped him outside a Starbucks, he had a job working at Quality Marketing Enterprise as an account representative. He lamented in that interview that he only had $3 in his pocket...but only until he cashed his paycheck. During his college years, right up to graduating on April 30, he had been a paid Resident Assistant. And, while collecting his paycheck from QME, he had multiple job interviews lined up with companies in his chosen field of accounting. In at least one of those, he told his Facebook friends, he had made the first cut and was waiting to hear if he would be hired.
None of that means King doesn't face what a lot of new graduates do. This, moreover, is a tougher-than-usual year for new graduates. Michigan is one of the six states where the official unemployment rate is still above 10 percent after more than three years of job destruction. And that statistic doesn't begin to tell the whole story. But King's situation pales compared with Americans who really don't have jobs, who don't have college degrees or the money to obtain one, who have exhausted their unemployment benefits if they were lucky enough to have any in the first place, have spent their savings and may have lost their homes.
While the acute wounds caused by the recession are mending ever so slowly, the economy is still a wreck and the human pain and suffering that wreckage has caused is immense. No question about it. Plus there are the chronic problems.
If the Romney campaign really wanted to look at unemployment and its causes, however, it might poke around a bit in the circumstances Barack Obama inherited in January 2009. The legacy plunked atop his administration on day one was nearly a decade in which Americans had lost ground, in which the unemployment rate had never once fallen as low as it was when George W. Bush came into office, in which deficit spending had gone to cover tax breaks for the already affluent instead of investments in a prosperous future for all Americans.
It's certainly true that the Democrats have not done all they should have—or even proposed all they should have—to repair and reshape the economy. They deserve some harsh criticism about that, and, frankly, quite a few of them ought to be replaced if more progressive substitutes could be found.
But from day one, the leaders of the party that Mitt Romney seeks the presidential nomination from have tried—with considerable success—to block any attempt to reverse the mess that they themselves have so generously contributed to. Their economic prescription: end unemployment benefit extensions; cut student grants; slash social services at a time when they are most needed; bust unions; deregulate; privatize; and, naturally, cut taxes on the most affluent—again.
That's why neither Romney nor the other Republican candidates poke beneath the surface. It demolishes their narrative. They have been the tip of spear when it comes to creating the economy that Ryan King and Americans with less than $3 in their pockets and no paychecks to cash live in. Given the chance, they will stick with a formula well proven to make matters worse.