Elections 2010: Bad News On The Jobs Front. Don’t Reward Republicans For Engineering It.

How Much Pain Are Republicans Willing To Inflict on The American People? That was the question Dee Dee Myers asked in a Vanity Fair column back in March 2009 when Rush Limbaugh and many Republican politicians were flatly announcing their wish for Obama to fail (and he only does that if America fails). The answer is “lots.”

In what is considered bad news for Democratic candidates for Congress, new jobs figures were released today, and they don’t look good. Although the private sector added 64,000 jobs in September, far too view to offset the 159,000 lost by the government at all levels (smaller government anyone?). Many of these jobs—72,700—were lost as schools cut back on staff. (One of the most influential conservative activists, Grover Norquist, famously said he wanted to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Do you really want to drown your local school system?)

The painful part of this is that it was all not merely predicable, but predicted—and quite avoidable if only a few more Republicans had sided with Senate Democrats. But no, they saw predictions of citizen pain and predictions of their political gain.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the economy would begin to improve in late 2009, but that unemployment would continue climbing to over 10%. And indeed technically the Recession ended in June of 2009. Only it was, indeed, what is called a jobless recovery.

By creating between 1 and 3 million jobs, the Stimulus package which President Obama and the congressional Democrats passed with the help of only three Republican Senators (Susan Collins and Olympia Snow of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania no Republican Representatives voted for the bill) in 2009 has helped keep the unemployment rate below the CBO’s prediction.

At the time many economists, such as Paul Krugman, warned that the stimulus package was too small to really kick start job growth, but Obama is not the king of the United States, and the smaller stimulus bill was all he could get even minimum Republic support for. The Democrats had to settle for what they could get.

Want proof? With the economy still sluggish and unemployment still over 9%, President Obama and the Democrats attempted to pass another stimulus package. This one included more money to support local governments and education—money to prevent the precise job losses we have seen this month. Senatorial Republicans filibustered it. They killed it just in time to increase job losses before the elections.

This is the failure that the Republicans wanted. Are you going to reward them for it?

“But what about the deficit?” you ask. Krugman and other economists say that the deficit is important to worry about, but deficit spending is necessary now to put Americans back to work, and increased prosperity is one of the best ways to ultimately decrease the deficit. The Democrats are listening, so are the Republicans. Only the Republicans are happy with a jobless recovery. It increases their chances of winning. Are you going to reward them for it.

Anger over the economy directed at the Democrats is gut-think. Anger at Republicans, who have helped assure a jobless recovery, is head-think. Think with your head and get out and vote. Pass it on