Something interesting occurred to me last night, watching PBS, right after Virginia Governor Bob McConnell made a comment about the unemployment rate being above 8% for 43 months straight.
Today I read that Governor Mitt Romney has also mentioned this fact recently.
The thought that occurred to me led immediately to another thought: the Obama Biden campaign should be shouting this message from the rooftops. It could be the "best news for John McCain!" that this election cycle sees.
In the space where I get to tell more and you have to click to read, I will tell more.
See, it's all about how long back the GOP Regurgitators of the Talking Points™ want to go. Because by my math, and going by most news reports that indicate he took office on January 20, 2009, President Obama has been in office three years, seven months, and eighteen days. Well, Three years is thirty-six months, best I can tell. That's calculated based on the modern concept of twelve-month years. Maybe in an alternate universe there are more, I don't know.
So, I added thirty-six months to seven months and eighteen days. Well, it's not like you can add months and days, that's like apples & oranges (more like raisins & watermelons, actually). But I can add months to months (and cars to cars, and dogs to dogs, and men & men—but not dogs & men: it was something covered in first-grade math class). Adding them up gives a result (sum; learned what that was called in fourth-grade math) of forty-three months. So President Obama has actually only been President Obama for forty-three months and eighteen days.
Quick, how long was President Obama President before the unemployment rate topped 8%? Okay, take a minute if you need to. I will tell you something else while you figure it out. President Obama had an approval rating above 70% when he took the Oath of Office. It stayed above 60% well into the Spring of 2009. Maybe even into the Summer. Okay, if you haven't figured it out yet, the answer is 18 days.
So here is where it gets interesting. At least, as Gov. McConnell and Mitt Romney tell it, apparently everything was all hunky-dory when President Obama took over, and then, within eighteen days, he did something to drive the unemployment rate over 8%. Let's go over that again: According to GOP talking points, President Obama, in the course of eighteen days, so thoroughly botched the job that unemployment shot up to 8%, and has stayed there ever since.
But that's not the best part. Remember that thing I covered earlier, when you were doing the arithmetic? Well, probably not, as most of us are far less apt at multitasking than we think. You can go back up and look at it again. It's OK. It's the thing about President Obama's popularity for those first eighteen days and beyond.
So here's the situation, if Republican statements are to be believed: President Obama botched the American Economy while the American People cheered him on. My logic-dar just went off. Logic-dar is that thing where you can just sense if someone is logical or not; you just know.
So, any of you that know anything about geometric logic would know what to do next. For the rest of you, it's like this: you have reached a point where there's a contradiction in your conclusions (in this case, that peopel cheer for job losses), so you check the logic, if that's good (it is), then you question your assumptions. Putting in a bad assumption and finding a contradiction is actually a time-honored way, called Indirect Proof, to prove the opposite of your bad assumption. So let's look at our assumptions.
President Obama has been in office for 43 months & 18 days; no, that's pretty well-established. President Obama was widely popular in his first three months; that one is solid, too. So I have either that President Obama really didn't do something to raise the unemployment rate, or that everything was not hunky-dory when he took over. Since the first one doesn't fit the narrative (we will leave it for others to figure out it's really not relevant anyway; he gets the blame regardless, in polls and right-wing conspiracies), we have to figure that the latter may actually be the case.
So, the GOP accusation of 43 straight months of 8%+ unemployment leads logically to the conclusion that President Obama was left a mess. Which is to say, the GOP themselves are establishing the veracity of any claim that it was really Bush's fault.
Thanks, guys!