This spot is going up in seven swing states, with more than $3 million behind it:
When your opponent hands you a gift in politics, you exploit it -- and this was a very generous, particularly tin-eared gift. I'm always tempted to call the president's comment a "gaffe," but that term does not apply here. This was not a frivolous slip of the tongue; as Marc Thiessen argued earlier in the week, Obama was merely stating what many Leftists believe:
While pushing a Democratic proposal to spend another $35 billion we don’t have to help states hire more public workers, Reid declared: “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers.” At last week’s news conference, Obama simply repeated the point Reid made last October. Jared Bernstein, a former Obama economic adviser, said the president’s gaffe won’t do lasting damage “because that’s not the way he sees it.” But as Reid’s comment demonstrates, that is precisely how Obama and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill see it. They’ve been saying for months that the private sector is doing fine and that the solution to our unemployment problems is to spend even more taxpayer money to hire more government workers.
We covered the Reid comment with no small measure of incredulity last fall, noting back then that workers in the government sector actually had the lowest unemployment rate of any broader American industry. And so it remains today. As for the private sector, Ed Morrissey writes that things aren't looking any rosier in the weekly jobless claims -- "unexpectedly," of course.
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