I didn’t invent the phrase “Its the economy, stupid”, that phrase was the brainchild of James Caraville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager.  It was used to unseat President George H W Bush.  At the time it was popular and used in many forms such as “It’s the weather, stupid”, practically anything could be put into this simple expression.  It’s an expression that we need to re-visit since it is so appropriate today.  In documenting his fall from infallibility, President O’bama’s, biographers will have many opportunities to apply the phrase.  But I would like to beat them to the punch and suggest a few uses at the end of July 2009. 

ITS THE ECONOMY STUPID Part 2

Americans can plainly see that the economy is not fixed, or healed, or reversed yet.   Too many people are out of work and the ARRA stimulus plan may or may not be helping.  It is really too early to blame President Obama for problems in the economy.  One thing however, is becoming clearer, and that is his putting too many programs that don’t create jobs immediately into the ARRA.  Doing that was a big mistake.  Programs such as Comparative Effectiveness Research, and Health Information Technology are perhaps marginally laudable programs but they would never have passed Congress without riding on the coat tails of a bigger spending package where their cost looked smaller in comparison to the total package.  They have little if any chance of aiding the employment picture immediately.  They were pork without even a clear definition of what their success would be.  Some economists say that there wasn’t enough real stimulus in the stimulus package.   Meanwhile, people are getting impatient.   They want to see their President working hard on the economy first and foremost. 

ITS NOT ABOUT HEALTH CARE, STUPID

Meanwhile  Mr. Obama is off trying to re-do the health care systems or dilemmas, if you will.   I use the words in the plural since we don’t have one simple problem to address, such as “cost”.   We face a whole boatload of problems that are all intertwined and as hard to define as racial heritages in our melting pot society.  Quality, Access, and Cost form the big three areas of health reform.  And these three areas have problems in both the health care sense as well as the insurance sense.  When one manipulates something in one or two places a third area becomes an intolerable new problem.  It is clear that Mr. Obama in his good intentions failed to give the subject enough honor.   Health reform may likely be the one issue that is too complex for us to undertake with a political process, let alone when there is too much debt and our economy overall is still weak.   Besides, there is no major outcry for health care or health insurance reform.  All agree reform is needed, but not the socialized medicine the Democrats on the left are proposing.  Most, if not all of the current proposals are expensive and have already been shown in real life not to work.  To be repetitive, I would suggest that health reform can come later, for now “It’s the economy-stupid.”   

And what about the environment Cap and Trade and the financial regulatory system?  Aren’t these topics ones that can wait until we make sure the economy is healed?  One could legitimately ask Mr. Obama, did you forget the economy?  It is clear that our President is not hard at work daily doing all he can do to stimulate the creation of new jobs.  People want to know that their President is putting his hands on the items that need the most healing right now.  And don’t forget that not even even you can get support for new programs and taxes and fees out of people who don’t have any money, don’t have a job or who are just hanging on to their little corner of the world. 

ITS NOT ABOUT RACE STUPID

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama got  diverted from the many subjects that need his full attention to give a short but clearly racist remark about a friend getting arrested.  Not that one blames a black man from discussing racial profiling.  But the President reacted without hearing both sides of the incident.  So now he has to deal with the fact that he stated that some really good people “acted stupidly”.  This ties in very conveniently with the theme of this little homily on the economy.  The incident was about an upper class man with stubborn pride who thought he was above complying with the request of a police officer who was just doing his job.   It is an incident unworthy of your attention.  

DON’T SAY STUPID-STUPID

The “sharp” bright energetic Obama team currently at work in Washington are long on intelligence but short on common sense.  They must think that the American people are stupid.  There is now a long and growing litany of their saying things that are simply not true.  Whether it be the truth of numbers or the truth of how a particular section of a health insurance proposal will affect a certain aspect of health care, the Obama administration can look right in the camera and promise and say things that will never become reality.  Do they not think that their opponents will discover the tricky words and phrases they use and find the real truth that lies below the rhetoric?  It is as if they all feel like Sen. Charles Schummer of New York who said the public didn’t care about the government dealings.  It is as if they have signs hanging in their office that says “They’re all stupid”.  But like the character Kevin Kline played in the movie “A Fish Called Wanda”, no one likes to be called stupid.  So don’t say stupid-stupid. 

ITS THE ECONOMY STUPID Part 3

So the President needs to be attending to the economy first, second, and third.  He needs to be seen in committee meetings, talking with business leaders, Wall Street gurus, and the banking and finance folks.  He needs to be toe to toe with critical aspects of our financial problems and he needs to do that uninterrupted until we are out of this deep recession.  However politically inconvenient it is to have to deal with the economy instead of trotting out grand schemes for every other problem we face, this is what he really should be doing.  It is a sad calculation that President Obama has made, that the people of this country can’t tell right from wrong when it comes to what the President should be doing.  They know that “IT’S THE ECONOMY-STUPID”.  Why doesn’t he?