Tag Archives: economy

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(Cross-posted over at Undernews:

The past three days were my first here in Tampa working on a non-partisan voter registration campaign targeting underrepresented voting groups in the area. No one was asked about how they planned to vote. But several people – at the supermarket, at the Wal-Mart, at the gas station – made comments to me about it, including:

“I’m not voting for Bush because he doesn’t care about poor people like me. Maybe if I owned this store, I might vote for him.”

“Of course I’m voting – we need to knock Bush out of that chair while we can.”

“I’m voting for John Kerry because he wants to make my health insurance cheaper.”

“No, I’m not voting. I don’t like Bush or Kerry – neither of them cares about people like me.”

“I’m definitely not voting for Bush. But who’s the other one that’s running?”

Most of the folks I’ve talked to have a very clear idea of what they think of George Bush – generally a very, very negative one. Many fewer have a clear idea of who John Kerry is and what he’s about – and it’s not because he hasn’t run enough TV commercials. For some hurt by what these years under Bush have wrought, here and nationally, haziness about Kerry won’t make much difference in whether they show up in November. For others, it will make all the difference.

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Bush is now touting declining unemployment numbers:

Unemployment dropped today to 5.7 percent. That’s not good enough. We want more people still working. But nevertheless, it is a positive sign that the economy is getting better.

But as the Baltimore Sun reported:

The nation’s unemployment rate dropped sharply to a 14-month low in December, but underlying that positive number was grim economic news – only a handful of new jobs were created and hundreds of thousands of discouraged people dropped out of the work force.

In other words, the Bush economy is so strong, Americans have given up on even looking for jobs in it.

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Ann Coulter has a new conspiracy theory: The American government (less often than she thinks, but never mind that) allows people who benefit from government services to vote for candidates who support perpetuating them. This is classic Coulter – first she argues that shredding the federal government is supported by everyone except for wealthy Hollywood celebrities and a pathological underclass – then that tax-cutting Republicans have it rough because so many Americans greedily want to keep paying taxes and benefiting from the services they pay for. Conservatives, of course, never vote their economic interest…

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This must be why President Bush doesn’t do press conferences more often.

One highlight would be the implication (in the context of defending himself as tolerant of gay people despite not wanting them to have civil rights like marriage) that homosexuals are sinners:

I am mindful that we’re all sinners and I caution those who may try to take a speck out of the neighbor’s eye when they got a log in their own,” the president said. “I think it is important for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts.”

Another would be blaming the failure of massive tax cuts to jump-start the economy on the media’s choice to cover his desire to go to war:

I remember on our TV screens–I’m not suggesting which network did this, but it said: “March to war,” every day from last summer until the spring: “March to war, march to war, march.” That’s not a very conducive environment for people to take risks when they hear “march to war” all the time.