In a stinging indictment of President Obama’s tenure in the White House, at The Daily Beast Stuart Stevens slams President Obama for the devastating “new normal” that his failed economic polices have brought to the country. Stevens also blames the Old Media complex for ignoring the pain inflicted on America by those same failed policies.
Stevens begins his April 9 piece relating the sort of economic facts that the rest of the media conveniently ignore. He points out that even as the administration claims that unemployment is only around 8 percent, so many people have dropped out of the work force that the unemployment stat is but a hollow representation of the true unemployment rate.
He also points out that 16 million Americans have been added to Obama’s food stamp rolls since 2008, “a 46 percent increase and greater than the population of Ohio,” Stevens says. “More than 50 million Americans now live in poverty. That’s one in six Americans, and one in five American children.”
This, Stevens says sharply, is the worst since LBJ was president and it was so bad then that the Texan launched a “war on poverty” to try and cure it.
The economy is so bad, Stevens says, and so many Americans are doing so poorly that this dire situation should be the most central discussion in the media today. But all this horrendous malaise, all this soul-killing economic depression, is not even being reported upon because those that do the reporting live in those small sections of the country that are doing well: the big cities propped up by government largesse.
Our national conversation now is dominated by the voices of the small, thriving minority. Go back and scan the coverage of the president’s inaugural address this January, which barely mentioned jobs. Reporters from the nation’s biggest outlets–who work and live in prosperous New York and D.C.–scarcely acknowledged the omission. Perhaps the economy has been bad enough for long enough that its expiration date for news has expired, one more sign this terrible reality is the New Normal.
Unfortunately, in Steven’s view, neither the President nor the media so eager to curry his favor and keep their own gravy train chugging down the tracks have any interest at all in bringing the United States back to economic health.
Stuart Stevens’ piece was both an indictment of Obama’s failed leadership as well as a slam on the media that has Obama’s back.
