Independent voters no longer need to watch TV, go to the movies, attend comedy clubs or listen to Donald Trump insist he is really considering a third party run for amusement.
We can just watch the dance of the partisans.
Many of us independent voters are not just turned off to political polemics but we have to turn off the increasingly predictable (and often execrable) ideological talk shows of the left and right. And we’ve become accustomed to not treating the mouthings of many politicians of BOTH parties seriously when something happens because they react with sheer partisan predictability in such a way that it seems like something out of The Onion or Mad Magazine, or SNL.
Rick Santorum has made one for the Guinness World Records. And with this comment he now wins a highly coveted chair — no, let’s make that a sofa — in TMV’s Get A Life Club.
The good news is that unemployment is up:
The United States added 200,000 new jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday, a robust number that came on the heels of a flurry of heartening economic news. Consumer confidence has lifted, factories have stepped up production and small businesses are showing signs of life. The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent, its lowest level in nearly two years.
It was the sixth consecutive month that the economy showed a net gain of more than 100,000 jobs — not enough to restore employment to prerecession levels but enough, perhaps, to cheer President Obama as he enters the election year.
The sustained run of positives had economists like Markus Schomer, of PineBridge Investments, feeling much more optimistic than they did back in August, after a spring and summer of lost economic ground and a demoralizing debate over the debt ceiling.
At that time, Mr. Schomer thought, as many did, that government dysfunction was paralyzing the economy. Now, he is ratcheting up his growth forecast for 2012.
“The improving trend in the U.S. labor markets is not just a temporary blip, but seems to be something quite sustainable,” he said, adding that the improvement had come despite continued Washington gridlock.
But, as The Times notes, due to other factors the cup is “half full.”
It is good news. And most thoughtful people of the right, left and center and Democrats and Republicans would leave it at that.
Now the bad news: Rick Santorum says it’s due to…people thinking the Republicans will retake the White House:
Surging Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum downplayed President Obama‘s role in the good news that the unemployment rate fell to 8.5% in December, the lowest level in three years. According to a tweet by Politico‘s Dave Catanese, Santorum claimed unemployment was dropping as a result of widespread “optimism that Republicans will take the White House.”
If so, Rick, I don’t think most people think it’ll be with you as the one retaking it.
Advice to Rick and other Republicans: it hugely undermines your credibility when you say comments like this. On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh will say it and mlllions of listeners will believe it’s so.
It’s clear that short of Barack Obama personally setting up jobs in companies or Christine O’Donnell twitching her nose and creating them, the same old political game will be played.
But it does make for an amusing dance.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.