Where are the jobs?
From Political Animal:
Former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino played her usual role on Fox News yesterday, trashing economic recovery efforts. Most of her comments were easy to dismiss, but a couple of remarks stood out.
She noted, for example, that White House officials “try to claim that the stimulus bill worked and I just look at all the polling data and no one believes it.” In other words, it doesn’t matter what’s true — it matters whether people can be misled into believing things that aren’t true. (That is, of course, why Fox News exists.)
As much as I’d like to think otherwise, there’s probably something to this. We know the stimulus has been effective in rescuing the economy from collapse; we know the stimulus has helped create as many as 1.6 million jobs; we know the stimulus has produced economic growth for the first time in a year; and we know that if we’d listened to Republicans at the height of the crisis, there’d be no talk of recovery. But if “no one believes it,” there are minimal political benefits.
Similarly, Perino called the notion of saving jobs that would have been eliminated a “cockamamie scheme,” which “everyone knows” is “fake.”
Now, those of us who’ve watched Perino over the years know that the poor thing is a few watts short of a light bulb. But, again, her larger point about perceptions is rather sound — what’s real matters less than what’s believed.
With that in mind, I suspect Democratic leaders and officials would be wise to disseminate this report (see the video above) from ABC News last night far and wide.
