The Democratic National Committee is teaming up with the White House to show solidarity for President Obama's American Jobs Act, the legislative text of which the White House will release today (several days after the President's 'the buck stops with me, but not really' speech introducing the Act).
On Monday, the DNC announced a round of T.V. and online ads as well as a new website to help promote Obama's $477 billion American Jobs Act, which the president unveiled roughly a week earlier. The legislation aims to create jobs through $175 billion in employee payroll tax cuts, extending unemployment insurance benefits for another year, and increased infrastructure spending. ...
The television spots begin airing on Monday in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Virginia. The online ads will appear on a number of well trafficked websites and social networking sites like Hulu, YouTube, Pandora, and Facebook. ...
The DNC's ads are in addition to the White House's efforts to quickly push the job creation legislation forward. After Obama's speech in front of Congress, the White House and Democrats began blasting out emails with endorsements of the American Jobs Act.
The "the next election is fourteen months away" meme in these ads is a thinly veiled attempt to make our economic problems look like political fails, instead of policy fails. The President is accusing the GOP of spitefully standing in the way of economic progress in order to keep the President unpopular until November 2012. So, in a nutshell, he's reproaching everyone else for playing politics, while unabashedly playing politics.
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But underneath their cool, "none of the GOP candidates are electable," sanctimonious exterior, I'm beginning to detect some mild undertones of panic emanating from the Democratic party. After years of hardly anything but words, words, words from the President, with very little in the way of positive tangible results, the economy is still stuck in the mud, and Americans know it. No matter how the White House attempts to spin the pathetic economic situation, the Democrats' claims that "we can get this economy moving again" are starting to sound increasingly frantic. Even The New York Times is reporting that Democrats are openly fretting about the President's chances:
Elected officials and party leaders at all levels said their worries have intensified as the economy has displayed new signs of weakness. They said the likelihood of a highly competitive 2012 race is increasing as the Republican field, once dismissed by many Democrats as too inexperienced and conservative to pose a serious threat, has started narrowing to two leading candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, who have executive experience and messages built around job creation.
And in a campaign cycle in which Democrats had entertained hopes of reversing losses from last year’s midterm elections, some in the party fear that Mr. Obama’s troubles could reverberate down the ballot into Congressional, state and local races. ...
“The alarms have already gone off in the Democratic grass roots,” said Robert Zimmerman, a member of the Democratic National Committee from New York, who hopes the president’s jobs plan can be a turning point. “If the Obama administration hasn’t heard them, they should check the wiring of their alarm system.”
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