The Democrats are liberalism's worst salesmen

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the stimulus generated between 600,000 and 1.6 million jobs. It lowered the nation’s unemployment rate between 0.3 and 0.9 percentage points. Significant, but not exactly “catastrophe” avoiding. At best, as of now, the stimulus has cost $491,875 per job created. Meanwhile, the nation still languishes in double-digit unemployment…

Thursday, ahead of the new unemployment numbers, Obama convened a jobs summit. “We cannot hang back and hope for the best when we’ve see the kinds of job losses that we’ve seen over the last year,” the president told reporters.

But where was this aggressive attitude in February? Where was the jobs summit then? Why did the Democratic leadership not stick to what Democrats once did best? Why did Obama outsource the stimulus package to Congress? That was not FDR or LBJ’s style. Why did Obama not personally invest his then-popular image into a jobs bill?…

Blame rests on the powerful. That’s the Democrats. And liberalism is, in Lichtman’s words, “a huge casualty.”