The Gaffe Heard Round The World - President Incompetano Speaks Off Teleprompter - You Really Cannot Fix Stupid!

[Selene]

The Peter Principle President actually said:

"The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

And so, you know, if Republicans want to be helpful, if they really want to move forward and put people back to work, what they should be thinking about is how do we help state and local governments and how do we help the construction industry?"

The Peter Principle President's cluelessness is astonishing it what it reflects about his economic ignorance.

As one commentator explained,:

"...the belief that the private sector is rich and the public sector is poor, so that transfers of wealth from private sector to public sector are endlessly justified, is embedded deeply in Obama’s ideology.

The classic formulation of this proposition goes back to John Kenneth Galbraith’s

The Affluent Society

, published in 1958. Galbraith contrasted the worlds of “private opulence and public squalor” in the course of arguing for massive government spending programs. Galbraith’s book was epically wrong-headed, but the idea that the private sector is rich and the public sector is underfunded lives on as one of the pillars of liberal ideology.

...Government spending consumes an ever-growing share of America’s wealth, and study after study shows that public sector workers are paid vastly better than private sector workers. In today’s world, opulence is far more a feature of the world of government than of private industry. But this is a fact around which leftists like Barack

Obama simply cannot wrap their minds.

They cling bitterly to the old stereotypes, because to do otherwise would call into question their entire worldview.

T

o them, the private sector is always “doing fine;” if anything, in their hostile eyes, too well.

Obama’s friends in the press will try to minimize the significance of what he said today, I suspect unsuccessfully. Romney’s campaign will make sure that millions of Americans find out that Obama thinks the economy’s miserable performance over the last four years is perfectly acceptable, at least as far as the private sector–something like 85% of Americans–is concerned."

Now, I am certain that the Main Stream Media will not cover this President's incompetent GAFFE to the same degree they covered past Presidential gaffes, like when:

1] Nixon once said to Frost, that, “When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.”;

2] Bush said, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”; or,

3] Bush explained that, “Let’s make sure that there is certainty during uncertain times in our economy.”

But let us remember that even this GAFFE is not President Incompetano's fault because we all know it was Bush's fault.

One hundred and fifty [150] days left before we get the chance to remove this embarrassment from the White House.

Adam

150 days and Counting

[Reidy]

Events have already proven you wrong. In just a few days, this has become one of Obama's most quoted remarks. Try pasting "private sector is doing fine" into a search engine.

[Selene]

Events have already proven you wrong. In just a few days, this has become one of Obama's most quoted remarks. Try pasting "private sector is doing fine" into a search engine.

Ah so you did not pick up the dripping sarcasm, or, the fact that the media is already helping him "walk back" the comment?

[Selene]

Notice how the Huffington Post explains the GAFFE:

"Obama's comments about jobs growth have some bearing. The economy has gained about 4.2 million private sector jobs since early 2010, putting payroll at about the same level as it was in January 2009. Since Obama took office, about 607,000 fewer people work in the public sector. State and local governments, unlike the federal government, generally have to balance their budgets, and with fewer revenues, spending cuts have forced layoffs.

As a political matter, the remark had all of the makings of a gaffe. The economy is Obama's biggest weakness in his campaign for re-election, and the comment almost certainly did not help the president's standing.

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has had his his share of poorly phrased statements about being "not concerned about the very poor" and liking to fire people when talking about choice in health care, jumped on the comment."

The last highlight is classic. The underlying assumption is that all presidential candidates make "poorly phrased statements," which attempts to place the Romney inartful phrase with the economically illiterate conceptual framework that the mutt in the White House thinks from about economic philosophy.

[Reidy]

The Campaign Spot at NR had an interesting juxtaposition:

Or see the whole thing at http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/302220/obamas-fundamentals-our-economy-are-strong-moment.

[Selene]

And here we have Slate.com, complete with spelling errors...

Zeke Miller is a one-man meat-grinder of news cyles and campaign "narratives." It was only fair that he first spotted the lede [<<<<love this one] from today's Obama presser.

Obama: “The Private Sector Is Doing Fine”

In a press conference in Washington, Obama offers up a gift to Republicans.

That's how Republicans will use this, just as Democrats used Mitt Romney's January remark that he "liked" being able to fire slackers who provided bad services****. The commonality: These remarks only sound bad if you buffer away the context. This is what Obama said.

We've created 4.3 million jobs over the past 27 months. Over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we're seeing problems is with state and local government, often with cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help they're accustomed to from the federal government.

This isn't even particularly clumsy phrasing. The stimulus bill, passed three years ago and change, included $53.6 billion of aid meant to help states fill in budget gaps and avoid laying off workers. (Because teachers and fire-fighters are popular, Democrats like to say that this money was for "teachers and fire-fighters." People with less-beloved government jobs got it, too.) It was pure uncut Keynesianism -- creating debt to hire people so they could keep consuming.

Smash cut to 2011. The stimulus money was spent; voters had elected new state and local leaders who promised to cut the fat, and a Republican House whose members winced at state "bailouts." Public sector lay-offs sped up. In the Bush era, the public sector had added nearly 1 million jobs. In the Obama era, it's down 600,000 jobs and counting.

Republicans were pretty clear about this -- they wanted to shrink the public sector. That's their philosophy. Grow the economy, de-regulate, privatize services, and you can have higher overall employment with fewer people on the public teat. But this is a sort of complicated argument to make to anyone who doesn't have Schumpeter on the Kindle. And so, today, the RNC blasts out statements like this.

WATCH Obama say the "private sector is doing fine" with unemployment rate at 8.2% and only 69K jobs added last month.

The video, shockingly, cuts out right before Obama mentions the public sector. Trivia question: Does the unemployment rate include public sector as well as private sector jobs? Indeed, it does! But explaining this takes some time. It's easier to pretend that the president doesn't care about the private sector, and unemployment, and hope that the media runs with the zinger instead of explaining some pretty rudimentary macroeconomics.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/06/08/the_private_sector_is_doing_fine_the_political_press_eh_.html

****This one is classic. It is not even close to what Romney said and it again attempts to equate one inartful phrase with a GAFFE that exposes O'bama's economic ignorance...

[Selene]

Mother Jones just can't wait to get on the defend the Economic Idiot train...they even explain that they got the "meme of the day":

Zeke Miller provides us with the meme of the day:

President Barack Obama offered up a gift to Republicans Friday morning, declaring "the private sector is doing fine," at a White House press conference.

"Where we are seeing weaknesses in our economy, had to do with state and local government, often times cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal Government, and who don't have the same flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in," Obama continued, calling on Congressional Republicans to take steps to help local and state governments create jobs.

Needless to say, Republicans have pounced on Obama's suggestion that the private sector is "doing fine." Here's the Romney campaign:

The 23 million Americans who are struggling for work are not ‘doing fine.’ Job creators and small businesses are not ‘doing fine.’ The middle class is not ‘doing fine.’ Etc.

There's no question that Obama left himself wide open to this attack. It's an unusual gaffe from someone who's usually more careful with his words. Still, whether Republicans like it or not, Obama is more right than wrong. The private sector may not be "doing fine," but it's doing OK. Meanwhile, the public sector continues to struggle badly, shedding jobs and cutting back on spending, and this has been a big contributor to our anemic recovery. Paul Krugman has the charts on spending here, and I've got the chart on employment below. As you can see, the private sector has indeed rebounded from the depths of the recession and is now adding two million jobs per year. That's not great, but it's not terrible. The public sector, conversely, started cutting jobs even before the stimulus money ran out and is now shedding about 200 thousand jobs per year. That may be good for conservative small-government ideology, but it's a significant drag on an already fragile economy.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/06/obama-private-sector-doing-fine

Anyone want to take a shot at ripping apart the graph above?

[Selene]

Ah Yogi, it's deja vu all over again...

As the great professor Yogi Berra explained, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."

If only President Incompetano would learn from Professor Yogi...

[Selene]

Zeke Miller is a one-man meat-grinder of news cyles and campaign "narratives." It was only fair that he first spotted the lede [<<<<love this one] from today's Obama presser.

I have just been informed by PM that I was in error on the spelling and use of the word "lede."

lede - c.1965, alternative spelling of "lead" in the newspaper journalism sense (see lead (v.)), used to distinguish this sense from other possible meanings of the word, perhaps especially the molten lead used in typesetting machines.

Once again, OL leads [ledes] to learning.

[Selene]

President Barack Obama’s campaign is still trying to clean up the mess he made last Friday when he said the “private sector is doing fine” after being asked about the nation’s economic situation at a White House press conference.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod on Monday tried to brush off the comment as a simple mistake that most Americans believe was just a bungled answer that’s been taken out of context by Republicans and the Mitt Romney campaign.

“Oh that again,” Axelrod said, dismissing a question about the statement during an appearance on CBS’s “This Morning.”[<<<<classic Axelrod...acting as if this is an absurd question to continue to bring up about Barack the Beautifully Pure and Perfect One] .

[And now the pivot]>>>>

Axelrod then tried to draw attention to a Romney comment suggesting the nation doesn’t need to hire more teachers, policemen or firemen.

Campaign officials were also asked about the president’s statement on CNN, but tried to deflect it by noting that Romney’s answer to the nation’s problem is “fire more people.”

In an attempt to get away for the issue, the Obama campaign has released a new ad attacking the former Massachusetts governor as a jobs killer, charging that tightening budgets in the state forced the layoffs of teachers and other public employees when he was governor from 2003 to 2007.

But the Romney campaign weighed in with its own ad on Monday showing the president making his statement at the White House, despite new jobless reports showing an increase in unemployment for May.

“Has there ever been a president so out of touch with the middle class?’ the ad concluded.

Even Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was critical of the president’s comment.

“That was an unfortunate line — I mean, the president bungled the line,” Krugman said on CBS’s “This Morning,” noting that the “the private sector is doing better than the public sector, which is not well enough.”

“And actually the real story about this economy is that cutbacks at the public sector are hurting recovery,” Krugman said, making a point that Obama sought to make on Friday.

“The private sector is doing fine,” the president said then. “Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy has to do with state and local governments.”

“By this point in Obama’s presidency, if we had normal public sector job growth, we’d have 800,000 more people — firefighters, school teachers, police officers,” Krugman continued. “Instead, we’ve got 600,000 fewer. So right there it’s like 1.4 million jobs that we should have had in the public sector and of course, those would translate into more private sector jobs too. So, that’s what [Obama] was trying to get at and of course, he screwed up the line.”

[Selene]

One aspect of the Romney campaign that I do like is that they keep attacking and do not let this bastard breath...

This is a solid, simple and tough commercial.Adam

[Selene]

[Selene]

[Selene]

31 4 Email1