COMMENTARY | It is fascinating to observe the new DNC Chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz, and the ease with which she is willing to verbalize her interesting thought processes. In my first article of the Florida Democrat, "New DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz Makes Inauspicious Debut," I reviewed her curiously shallow perspective of her own gender. Debbie feels that Obama's pay equity legislation, naming two women to the Supreme Court and the establishment of the White House Council on Women and Girls would be enough to clinch female support for his re-election.
Debbie doesn't seem to think that a poor economy and questionable foreign policies will be of any concern to her fellow females as they step into a voting booth as long as Obama has appointed a few women as judges and started a new girl's club. Of course, that "pay equity" thing isn't of much use if you can't find a job but, what the heck.
Not long after Obama successfully insulted Israel with his demand that they conform to Palestinian demands and return their borders to 1967 lines, the backlash was immediate, causing Obama to back peddle on his inflammatory remarks. Despite the threat from offended members of the Jewish community to withdraw their votes and well as their financial support, Debbie - while launching major damage control measures - simultaneously denied that there was a problem.
"There are Jewish voters, Jewish Americans who are expressing concern about the president's policy," Politico reported the Democratic National Committee chairwoman saying at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. But "to suggest that the president did significant damage to his support in the Jewish community is a gross overstatement."
Well, Debbie has done it again. Appearing on Sunday's Meet the Press, the DNC Chairwoman served up another line that seems to have been pulled straight from a script of Fantasy Island. After pointing out that nearly 60 percent of Americans disapproved of Obama's job performance, that unemployment is up 25 percent, the debt is up 35 percent and a gallon of gas has risen 104 percent, David Gregory asked the curiously ignorant Debbie, "Why should Americans trust Democratic governance on the economy right now and particularly the president's?"
Then, like a slow motion train wreck, the embarrassing exchange unfolded:
DWS: "Because we were able to, under President Obama's leadership, turn this economy around. When President Obama took office -- "
DG: "Whoa, whoa, let me just stop you there. Clearly, the economy has not been turned around. I mean, you just saw those numbers."
DWS: "It, it certainly'"it has -- "
DG: "Americans don't believe that's the case."
Undaunted, Wasserman Shultz continued to bail water in her effort to prove the Good Ship Obama wasn't sinking, insisting that the president's policies had created 2.1 million private sector jobs, most of which she claims occurred in the past six months.
Unfortunately for Debbie, a recent report by The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the 2.2 million people she may have been referring to were people who were recently counted as "marginally employed" even though they had stopped looking for a job or had simply not participated in the survey to confirm their ongoing status as unemployed.
Furthermore, according to the data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Obama economy has cost 2.5 million jobs since February of 2009.
Debbie Wasserman Shultz, for all of her adorable consistency in fact ignorance, has managed to finally clarify one thing that has left many Americans scratching their heads since Obama's stimulus shot a hole in the economy. At least now we now that when they say "jobs created", they really mean "jobs fabricated."
As for why Obama chose to appoint such an incompetent individual to head the Democrat National Committee during his re-election campaign when public perception of his judgment is already suffering, perhaps that will remain as mysterious as what they meant by "jobs saved."
