Obama Takes Credit For Saving America, Thanks the Unions

Obama’s Labor Day proclamation declares that “we have pulled our country back from the brink, through a series of tough economic decisions”.  Being a mere mortal, I do not possess his supernatural ability to peer into that alternate universe where disaster befell us because we did not do precisely what he and his administration have done.  Yet this latest bit of hubris falls flat, because his predictive record on the economy is abysmal.

We were told at the beginning that the stimulus would prevent unemployment from climbing beyond the possible temporary uptick to 8% by the summer of 2009.  We instead saw it shoot past that mark to peak at 10.2% by October 2010 (this after the “summer of recovery”).  It is still hovering around 9.1% with no positive news in sight.

But what praise he has beyond his own record he grants to the unions.  In his mind, only unionised workers deserve merit, despite the plummeting union rolls of membership to the point that manufacturing jobs are now at only 7% union, though government employees unions claim up to 36%.  But being so beholden to unions, he naturally praises them to the exclusion of the vast majority of workers.

One would think that Obama would be focused thereby on job creation, and he is if you take him at his word.  He and the Democrats have repeatedly told us how focused they are on the topic (and Redstate.com provides a handy list of the pulpit-pounding proclamations to that end), but now Obama is really going to get serious, after his campaign listening swing through the Midwest, and after his vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, and after a couple weeks or so to come up with an idea, here after over 2 ½ years into his term.