It is so bad that the Washington Post says it is awful! Via William Teach
Someone at the Washington Post will surely have received a phone call from the White House today to have a conversation with Josh Hicks, who compares and contrasts the economic records of George Bush and Barack H. Obama (I added the H because it’s raaaaacist): Obama’s remarks on worst job growth: Did he end it or should he own it?. Josh spends quite a bit of time going through numbers and such, and finally concludes
There’s no doubt that Bush owns an unimpressive record on job creation. But Obama comes in either last, second-to-last or in the bottom half among presidents since the Great Depression, depending on which way you look at the numbers.
The president said that policies from 2000 through 2008 produced the “most sluggish job growth we’ve ever seen.” Perhaps so, but the worst numbers on record occurred under his watch.
Obama chose a poor metric for measuring past administrations. To make his point with jobs data, he has to point to his own numbers and completely disavow much of them, or else ignore public-sector losses. We came close to thinking this was worth Three Pinocchios, but ultimately decided he was not necessarily including his record in the statement. Still, it’s a very fine line. The president should be much more careful about making such a sweeping claim.
This is, of course why Team Obama is focusing on anything except the economy. Oh, and about those lobbyists President Obama vowed NOT TO HAVE in the White House….
The Washington Post calls our attention to the number of lobbyists who visit the White House, despite the promise of President Obama to reduced the influence of lobbyists on his administration. In all fairness, it’s mostly Democrat lobbyists and those with close ties to Obama and his buddies that are granted access, so not all lobbyists have influence.
Before 9 a.m., a group of lobbyists began showing up at the White House security gates with the chief executives of their companies, all of whom serve on President Obama’s jobs council, to be checked in for a roundtable with the president.
At 1 p.m., a dozen representatives from the meat industry arrived for a briefing in the New Executive Office Building. At 3 p.m., a handful of lobbyists were lining up for a ceremony honoring the 2011 World Series champions, the St. Louis Cardinals.
And at 4 p.m., a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs arrived in the Old Executive Office Building for a meeting with Alan B. Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
It was an unremarkable January day, with a steady stream of lobbyists among the thousands of daily visitors to the White House and the surrounding executive office buildings, according to a Washington Post analysis of visitor logs released by the administration. The Post matched visits with lobbying registrations and connected records in the visitor database to show who participated in the meetings, information now available in a search engine on the Post’s web site.
The visitor logs for Jan. 17 — one of the most recent days available — show that the lobbying industry Obama has vowed to constrain is a regular presence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The records also suggest that lobbyists with personal connections to the White House enjoy the easiest access. (Read More
Darn, this seems to be politics as usual, another thing Obama vowed to end
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