Biden: Come see the Porkulus Paradise

posted at 4:00 pm on July 16, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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Joe Biden wants to make a big splash by campaigning in Eric Cantor’s district to rebuild support for Porkulus, despite its utter failure to stop the massive bleeding of jobs in the US.  Apparently, Cantor’s Republican reply to Barack Obama’s weekly radio address stung the White House a little more than first thought.  However, if the Washington Post has Biden’s speech correct, Obama may want to send him to a state funeral overseas for a while instead:

Vice President Biden plans a political broadside this afternoon in the home district of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), accusing the senior Republican lawmaker of joining in his party’s smear of the $787 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“To those who say that our economic decisions ‘have not produced jobs, have not produced prosperity, and simply have not worked’ I say, take a look around,” Biden will say, according to prepared remarks obtained by The Washington Post.

“I say, ‘Don’t let your opposition to the Recovery Act blind you to its results,’” Biden plans to say in the Richmond speech. “‘Come see what I see everywhere I go: workers rehired, factories reopened, cops on the street, teachers in the classroom, progress toward getting our economy back on the move.’”

Without naming Cantor directly, the rhetorical assault is aimed directly at the Richmond lawmaker, who has helped lead the Republican Party to its most effective message since Obama became president: that Obama’s stimulus bill has not produced jobs.

Is that what Biden sees wherever he goes?  Because this is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics has seen thus far in 2009.  As we can tell from the seasonally adjusted unemployment levels, Americans see a much different picture than Biden:

• January – 11,616,000 unemployed
• February – 12,467,000
• March – 13,161,000
• April – 13,724,000
• May – 14,511,000
• June – 14,729,000

Maybe he’d do better in New Hampshire with his vision of America getting back to work.  They got $416 million in Porkulus funds, which created a whopping 50 jobs — 34 of them full-time.

Meanwhile, exactly what prosperity has Porkulus created?  Did we have an economic recovery yesterday that the media missed?  Are people once again flush with cash?

Our opposition to Porkulus has not made us blind to its results, or especially the lack thereof.  If Biden wants to go to Virginia and claim that America has entered a new age of prosperity and full employment, then the constituents in that district will reasonably deduce that it is Biden who has blinded himself to America’s economic misery — and may have also gone a little crazy to boot.

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