(ThyBlackMan.com) The President will address the Nation on the state of the Nation at 9 p.m. tonight. Political pundits and those with inside knowledge of the President’s third and final speech before the election in November say President Obama will strike a populist tone and focus on the economy, taxes and the middle class. This is not new territory for President Obama. He first began setting his sights on the eroding middle class last December when he retraced the steps of former President Teddy Roosevelt to Osawatomie, Kansas. There he laid out a plan to get the country back to work and keep it growing by everyone making shared sacrifices and giving a little to give a lot.
Since that speech President Obama’s been pretty mum on the political scene. He made a recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He angrily insisted Congress extend the payroll tax cut when the two chambers fought over how to keep 95 percent of Americans paying less in taxes in a time of uncertain recovery. Since then he’s been seen but not really heard from. That is until tonight.
The State of the Union address comes right in the middle of the 2012 campaign season. The final four GOP candidates paint the President as inept to deal with the country’s challenges; an idea Washington Times writer Joseph Curl echoed in his Sunday editorial; The Truly Dismal State of the Union. In the editorial Curl suggests every citizen in this country from those in-utero to those in the ground and certainly everyone in between is to blame for the 
state of the economy. That is everyone but President Obama. In sarcasm and satire Curl says Obama’s argument that he inherited the crisis from the Bush administration leaves the current President blameless in the nation’s current economic condition.
“The unemployment rate when Mr. Obama was elected was 6.8 percent; today it is 8.5 percent — at least that’s the official number. In reality, the Financial Times writes, “if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 percent.”
Regular gasoline per gallon cost $1.68 in January 2009. Today, it’s $3.39 — that’s a 102 percent increase in just three years. (By the way, if you’re keeping score at home, gas was $1.40 a gallon when George W. Bush took office in 2001, $1.68 when he left office — a 20 percent increase.)”
On these two points Curl does not present all the facts. From 2001 to 2008 the annual unemployment rate increased every year under the tenure of President Bush except for in 2006 and 2007; at the height of the housing boom, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. After 2007 the unemployment rate once again ticked up. The average unemployment rate for the year 2008 was 5.8 percent. But that year we saw the unemployment rate rise every month from May to December. May 0f 2008 unemployment was 5.4 percent. By December it was 7.3. Unemployment jumped nearly two whole percentage points in seven months as the country hemorrhaged jobs.
When Obama entered the White House in January of 2009 the country was losing 750-thousand jobs a month. In January of 2009 unemployment was at 7.8 percent. It rose steadily throughout the year hitting 10 percent in October before dropping back into the highest of the high 9?s and flirting with that figure for the rest of 2009, all of 2010, and the better part of 2011.
Do these numbers look more favorable toward President Obama. No. But economists, conservative or liberal, will tell you it’s a lot easier to send unemployment up than it is to bring it back down. When we’re losing 750-thousand jobs a month we must first stop the bleed before we can even think about creating new positions. Nearly four years after the bleed began a clot has finally formed and we’re starting to restore the country averaging 200-thousand private sector jobs a month. It’s no home run on the economy for President Obama, but we have to look at the entire picture from where we came to where we are now to say there has been improvement even if it is only modest.
On Curl’s point on gas prices he’s just wrong. Looking only at the average price of gas at the beginning of George Bush’s term when he inherited a budget surplus and the most stable point of American economic prosperity to the end of his term when the country’s economy was flying first class to hell in a gasoline jet is a misnomer. We must remember the DOW’s wild ride in the last year of the Bush presidency. On October 11, 2007 the DOW closed at a record high of 14,279.96. On the day of Obama’s inauguration, January 20, 2009 the DOW closed at 7949.09. The market lost nearly half of its value in less than two years. It dropped further still to its lowest point on March 6, 2009 when the DOW closed for the day at 6,443. This market drop coincides with gas prices.
In July of 2007, just three months before the DOW reached its peak, oil was trading at a record $147 a barrel putting domestic gas prices in the $3.50 range in the South to the $4.60 range in the North. When Obama took office in January of 2009 those prices had free fallen to levels from the beginning of the decade; oil was trading around $50 a barrel.
To look at the beginning and the end of the Bush presidency and gather statistics on the economy is to paint a false picture of a new President who came in at a time where the biggest banks in our Nation were running out of money and had no recourse to get back on track; the converse storyline of Too Big Too Fail. Bush is to blame for this economy. However after nearly four years in office this is as much Obama’s problem as it was Bush’s when he left.
Curl can blame Obama for the state of the economy, the explosion of foodstamp use, the distinction of low-income and impoverished people juxtaposed against a high annual budget and an even higher deficit; which would have been higher still if Obama had done what he initially wanted to as far as government spending for a true economic rescue. But these facts are once again reported without context.
The Reno Gazzette Jounal, a newspaper affiliate of USA Today reports:
“We asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition service for month-by-month figures going back to January 2001. And they show that under President George W. Bush the number of recipients rose by nearly 14.7 million. Nothing before comes close to that.
And under Obama, the increase so far has been 14.2 million. To be exact, the program has so far grown by 444,574 fewer recipients during Obama’s time in office than during Bush’s.
It’s possible that when the figures for January 2012 are available they will show that the gain under Obama has matched or exceeded the gain under Bush. But not if the short-term trend continues. The number getting food stamps declined by 43,528 in October. And the economy has improved since then.”
Since the October 2011 distinction the unemployment rate has dropped .4 points. The Nation has added hundreds of thousands of jobs. As I noted in the beginning this may not be good enough but it is a start to pulling our economy out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
Whether you’re an Obama supporter or not does not matter when looking at the damage of the 2007 recession. Its constant comparison to the Great Depression illustrates how dire our economic situation was and still is. Instead of talking about how we got there and who’s to blame, let’s focus on how not to get there ever again, though that may prove difficult considering the economic problems plaguing Europe.
Tonight’s State of the Union is more than just an hour long moment for President Obama to officially launch his 2012 campaign and take jabs at Mitt Romney who’s tax returns revealed he paid a paltry 13.9 percent in taxes in 2010, or correct Newt Gingrich for race baiting by calling him the best Food Stamp President ever, or taking Rick Santorum to task for his lack of initiative focused on the middle class, or defending his foreign policy record against Ron Paul who wants an Afghanistan drawdown yesterday. Tonight’s State of the Union address is about laying out a plan for America that won’t backfire on us in one, two, five, 10 or 20 years. Tonight’s address is about what’s next not what happened.
The economy is on the minds of many the world over as it should be, but why are we dwelling on false facts skewed for a partisan viewpoint instead of a solution that no matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican you can get behind and promote for the good of the country.
Unless of course you’re the United States Congress which can’t support a damn thing but its re-election campaign.
But a girl can wish… Right?
Right.
Do you plan to watch the State of the Union address tonight? What do you want to hear?
Staff Writer; Nikesha Leeper
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