Returning To Jobs: The Afghanistan issue has dominated American politics this week. And before that was health care. But there is no subject out there more politically potent than jobs and the economy. How do we know? As we wrote earlier this week, one of us attended a focus group in Philadelphia, which was conducted by Democratic pollster Peter Hart for the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. The top concern of the 11 participants (consisting of seven Obama voters and four McCain voters) was clearly the economy, and a discussion about it provided the most gripping part of the focus group. Patricia, a 45-year-old bartender who voted for McCain, described her husband's difficulty getting work as a carpenter, and began to cry when talking about her fear of losing her home. Cheryll, 36, discussed how she, her father, and her brother had all lost their jobs.
The Blame Game: Only one participant in the focus group blamed Obama for the economy, while the others directed their ire at Wall Street (and companies like AIG) or at Congress. Lisa, a 44-year-old Obama voter, said it was her hope that the president would begin focusing on the middle class. "I wish he could do something to focus on the average person," she said. "I have a lot of hope he'll come up with something." After listening to these economic concerns, Hart told reporters that the Obama White House and Congress would be foolish not to do everything in their power to create more jobs. "If they don't do something about unemployment," he said, "they aren't watching what we are watching."
Dueling Summits: Hence today's dueling jobs summits. The White House's begins around 1:30 pm ET with opening remarks by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Vice President Biden, and the President Obama. Afterward, the participants break out into different discussions on green jobs, small business growth, transportation infrastructure, exports, business competitiveness, and workforce preparation. At 3:45 pm, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Obama will deliver closing remarks. The 130 guests participating at the White House job summit include folks from big business (like Google's Eric Schmidt and Fed-Ex's Fred Smith), small businesses, academia (Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz), and organized labor (the AFL's Richard Trumka and Change to Win's Anna Burger). Meanwhile, at 11:00 am on Capitol Hill, House Republicans will be hosting their own roundtable discussion on jobs. By the way, MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Report," which begins at 1:00 pm ET, features an interview with Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) to talk about the jobs summit and her state's battle with unemployment.
The White House's Goal For The Summit: In an interview with NBC News last month, President Obama was asked how this summit would create a job. His answer: "That's not the goal. We're doing all kinds of things to make sure that employment is accelerated. Our first job was to make sure that economic growth was happening, and we're starting to see that now. So what we're seeing now is businesses are starting to invest again, they are starting to be profitable again, but they haven't started hiring again. And so the goal of the jobs summit is figure out are they ways of us accelerating that hiring? And there are a whole range of ideas out there -- we've examined a lot of them. But one of the benefits of convening this group is it gives us chance to talk directly to small businesses, medium size businesses." The president will go to Allentown, PA tomorrow to get a first hand look at a town suffering from job losses. And then next week, he will lay out his plan to accelerate hiring.
John McCain, GOP Point Person On Afghanistan? For those of us who followed nearly every minute of the 2008 presidential campaign, it's fascinating to watch how John McCain has become the GOP point person in arguing that July 2011 is a date certain that will embolden the enemy. For starters, McCain never called for more troops to Afghanistan until July 15, 2008 -- nearly a year after Obama; for McCain, Iraq was the center on the war on terrorism, not Afghanistan. Second, he never put up much a fight when the Iraqi government and Bush White House established a "time horizon" to withdrawal from Iraq. And third, he himself talked about timetables during the campaign, saying that Maliki's 16-month timeframe was "a pretty good timetable" and also saying that all U.S. forces would be home from Iraq by 2013. McCain would argue -- rightly -- that his talk about timetables was always tied to conditions on the ground. But that's also true for Obama's July 2011 date. Here's what the president said on Tuesday: "Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground."
What Does July 2011 Mean? Speaking of that date, however, there has been plenty of confusion over the July 2011 deadline. Senior White House aides clarify -- it is simply a deadline for the start of the withdrawal. Perhaps just one troop comes home in July 2011, but some form of a withdrawal will begin in July 2011. The "conditions based" aspect to this is for the length of time the withdrawal will take. The confusion over this aspect of the president's new Afghanistan strategy is just another instance of the contradictions buried within the policy: It's a surge to expand the war, and it's also a plan to end the war; it's a plan to narrow the focus of the goals in Afghanistan, but also expand the policy to include Pakistan. This is a reminder that every choice the president faced could be described as a bad idea. He ended up choosing the idea that gives the military one last shot at doing it their way.
THERE IS A LOT MORE ON THESE TOPICS TODAY:
CLICK BELOW WITH A SECOND CUP of JAVA
First Read with NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd,
For more: The latest edition of First Read is available now at
http://www.FirstRead.MSNBC.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment