Republicans Not to Blame for Obama Jobs Plan Failure, Rove Says

Former presidential adviser Karl Rove said Monday President Barack Obama shouldn’t blame Republicans for Congress not embracing his American Jobs Act as it is the administration’s bad economic policies that have led to the Democratic Senate rejection of the plan and GOP lawmakers introducing proposals of their own to curb skyrocketing unemployment.

 

Obama Monday blamed the GOP for the administration’s decision to parse the jobs plan and present it to Congress in pieces as Republicans apparently don’t have the savvy to understand it as a whole.

 

“Great way to encourage cooperation, isn’t it? Look, this is a $447 billion duplicate of the $862 billion first stimulus bill — that first stimulus bill failed to work — unemployment went up,” Rove told Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs. “What makes us think that another round of $447 billion of reckless spending, just like the first bill, is going to do any different? I mean, if you talk about stupid, isn’t the definition doing the same thing again?”

 

Dobbs asked how Republicans will respond to Obama’s accusation that the GOP is obstructionist and has prevented millions of Americans from the opportunity to secure jobs.
 

 “The Republican rejoinder will be this bill isn’t going to create jobs,” Rove said. “When you’re in economic difficulty like we are now, we shouldn’t be raising taxes. And yet, the president is now willing to sort of flip and flop on his own views on taxes and say . . . keep running up the deficit, keep adding to the nation’s precarious financial situation in order to create jobs.

“We’ve tried that, Mr. President for two and a half years: Unemployment went from 7 percent to 9.1 percent; 14 million people are out of work — the largest number of people on long-term unemployment since the Great Depression — you know, it just hasn’t worked,” he continued. “Why should we go back and do it again? We’re going to have temporary stimulus measures paid for by permanent tax increases. Now, how stupid is that? And yet, the president thinks that if we don’t agree with him — it’s smartly salute and pass another bad bill, just like the Democrats did with the first stimulus — that somehow we’re to blame.