Sunday, November 21, 2010

An inconvenient truth

The railing Right would have us believe that the election earlier this month was a repudiation of the Obama administration's policy. Common wisdom is that it's all about jobs with voters. Since unemployment is higher than ever under the current administration, the conservative echo chamber would say, the electorate decided to evict President Obama's Democrat cohort from congress. As inconvenient as it may be for the GOP, the truth of the matter is that more private sector jobs have been created this year than in the entire eight-year tenure of the Bush administration.

Why do so many Americans think that the country is still shedding jobs? The same reason so many Americans think President Obama is a Muslim. It's the result of a false depiction of the government (i.e. the Democrat-controlled congress and the Obama administration) fabricated by the GOP and the right-wing media that has been adopted by the Tea Party and other middle-America voters without critically analyzing the messages that shape their view of the political environment. The fallacies are much more convenient for them than the truth is.

In fact, we have seen ten straight months of private sector job growth this year. More than 863,000 private sector jobs have been created in 2010. The number of new private sector jobs this year alone exceeds the total created during all eight years of the Bush administration.