Andrew Sullivan: How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics – The Daily Beast
All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.
It’s kinda funny, but the only President during my lifetime to oversee a real reduction in spending from one year to the next is the current one. Now the numbers show the same kind of decline in government employment…and still folks think they can tar Obama with a “socialist” label.
The rest of Sullivan’s piece gets at more of this reality-rejecting trend in Obama bashing. Good read, but only for realists.
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