During the race for the Whitehouse in 2008 until the financial collapse, jobs were not a deciding factor of the presidential campaign. However, just as Americans were being asked to choose our President, unemployment spiked, growing from 6 percent to 8 percent by the time President Obama took office. Americans gave the President a mandate for social change in the accelerating midst of what now can be reviewed as one of the greatest financial meltdowns in history. Our four year stoic process, unforgiving in times of turmoil, elected a president focused on providing his legacy with a steadfast commitment to the platform on which he was elected, including comprehensive healthcare reform. Not wanting to lose momentum for a greater destiny, he spent his political capital on national health care as America roiled in the short term desert of job losses.
It was a major political gaffe. The Republicans beat the ironic drums of elitist insensitivity, swarming the gates to take a landslide victory in which they made jobs a major campaign theme. Now, a year and a half after their congressional coup, Republicans have clearly tied their future to the idea that Americans will understand the connection between taming the national debt and jobs. By political brinkmanship, the Tea Party has successfully changed the debate, focusing attention on slowing the deficit and holding the line on taxing the rich. However, will this all or nothing approach win the hearts of a fickle electorate?
Americans have grown weary of politically staged dances over partisan issues surrounding the nation’s crises, yet not enough to rise up intra-election to collectively demand action. Having grown restless through the misdirection of political energy over healthcare and then having nervously sought refuge from Congress’s unnerving display over the deficit, America’s impatience is simmering into a frothing cry for political reason regarding jobs. The obvious delays by both parties to speak of jobs when one in six Americans is suffering their folly, has pent up frustration that will cause the electorate to violently express their anger in the polls if they are not urgently and effectively attended to by collegiate political attention.
Meanwhile, 900 days after taking office as 25 million Americans wait for signs of a political pulse, President Obama is now finally planning to announce a major jobs focus for 2011. Sensing a massive political opportunity, Democrats are now floating balloons for government sponsored jobs programs that have no chance of passing the Republican controlled House of Representatives and seem much more intent of retaking government by frenzying the 2012 voters against an obtuse Republican party than with truly putting Americans back to work.
For their part, Republicans, steeped in ideologue, are almost ignorant of the ground swell that will surge the American public toward any plan that promises employment. As such, misguided by obsolete principles that have served globalization and the enrichment of globalists in our midst at the expense of the Great Middle America, the Republicans most assuredly are setting themselves up for a pre-election coup, the size and ferocity of which catapulted them into power when the Democrats, cloaked in the civility of unfunded social programs, failed to act in the interests of the same immensely frustrated and growingly isolated electorate.
Without, a real alternative to a Democrat government jobs program that historically have swelled the ranks of government and choked off private investment, ultimately harming long term GDP and creating long lived entitlement debacles, the Grand Old Party will have let its ideology blindly guide it once again to the outskirts of contemporary debate. If the Republicans cannot fathom moving toward some form of activism which touts ideas of free enterprise and a support for domestic business, innovation and jobs, it will be left packing up its personal effects and moving out of the congressional offices that are intended for those that hold the short lived rule of American government.
If the end result of both parties’ calculated political dogma is that a pre-election year of grand political grandstanding fails to find a workable and immediate compromise to put America back to work, that another election punctuated by overwhelming disdain for a broken system swells the ranks of the Democrats as a symbol for America’s cry for help in a two party system, and that the Democrats misread their mandate while the Republicans retrench in confusion over having lost the electorate’s support for responsible long term goals of budget balancing because of a trumping short term goal of feeding their families, the American people will have suffered the greatest of wrongs.
The consequences of our Congress’s inactions will be rising unemployment, increased debt, additional time for the elite to offshore and monetize wealth into gold bullion, a growing obsolescence of job skills in America as the East excels in educational scores, additional international credit downgrading resulting in higher interest rates that rob our social programs of needed funding, increased societal self doubt, and political finger pointing by politicians whose realities have shattered. A real opportunity for improving the lives and futures of all Americans will have been lost.
Clif Carothers
Job Voucher Plan 