Tag: george h w bush
Under Biden, More Jobs Created Than Last Three GOP Presidents Combined

Under Biden, More Jobs Created Than Last Three GOP Presidents Combined

The latest jobs report shows that the unemployment rate has also reached a 50-year low.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday released its jobs report for December 2022, showing that 223,000 jobs were added to the economy, while the unemployment rate has fallen to 3.5 percent.

The new report shows that a total of 10.7 million jobs were added in the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term. By contrast, under the three Republican presidents who preceded Biden — Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and George H.W. Bush — U.S. job production was much slower.

At the conclusion of George H.W. Bush’s four-year presidency in 1993, 2.6 million jobs had been created. During George W. Bush's two terms, between 2001 and 2009, 1.3 million jobs were created; and 3 million jobs were lost during Trump’s single term.

Trump has the worst record on jobs since the Great Depression, and is the only modern president who left office with a negative jobs record. Under Trump, unemployment hit a record high of 14.7 percent in April 2020, and when Biden took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.3 percent.

Biden’s record is more in line with those of his Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, with 12.5 million and 22.7 million jobs added during their presidential terms, respectively.

The current unemployment rate of 3.5 percent is the lowest since 1969. The bureau's report also showed an increase in employment for workers with disabilities to a level higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Unemployment among Black and Hispanic workers also fell.

“Today’s report is great news for our economy and more evidence that my economic plan is working,” Biden said in a statement. “We still have work to do to bring down inflation, and help American families feeling the cost-of-living squeeze. But we are moving in the right direction.”

Biden noted additional actions by his administration designed to help the economy grow, including construction projects underway that are funded under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Biden also cited efforts to strengthen supply chains and expand domestic manufacturing with legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act.

“We have more work to do, and we may face setbacks along the way, but it is clear that my economic strategy of growing the economy from the bottom up and middle out is working,” Biden added.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Lesson For Democrats: How Alpha Tim Ryan Dominated J.D. Vance

Lesson For Democrats: How Alpha Tim Ryan Dominated J.D. Vance

At least one Democrat has started to figure out how to exploit a GOP weakness. He's Tim Ryan, who is running against J.D. Vance for Ohio's open Senate seat.

What has Ryan figured out? He's calling out Vance as a beta male.

Look, in a different world — say, the planet Vulcan — where the inhabitants, like Mr. Spock, were unburdened by primitive passions and instincts, everyone would make decisions about political candidates based entirely upon rational policy choices. But that's not how humans operate. Part of politics is about policies, of course. But beneath the surface — and these days, not very far beneath the surface — political combat partakes of the dog park. There are rituals of alpha dominance and beta submission.

Recall that in July 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was running 17 points ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush. Nothing crashed his numbers more surely than his response to a debate question. CNN's Bernard Shaw, noting the governor's opposition to the death penalty, asked whether, if Dukakis' wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered, he thought he might change his view. Dukakis responded: "No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life."

Now, granted, it was a bad question, because all of us would respond with rage if someone we loved were raped and murdered, and that's not the best way to make policy. So Dukakis' answer was perfectly appropriate as a policy matter, but it was a disaster as a political matter. Voters thought he was some sort of machine bereft of human feelings and betraying his role as manly wife defender.

Candidates have long performed at two levels in debates, parrying and thrusting about issues but also asserting dominance in mammalian code. In 2000, Al Gore and George W. Bush were seated on chairs without lecterns for a townhall-style debate. At one point, as Bush was speaking, Gore strode over to his side of the stage and right into Bush's personal space. Bush looked at him and gave him a curt nod as if to say, "I see what you're doing, and it's not working."

So voters want their leaders to be assertive and commanding. That has always been the case, and in recent decades, before the Trump era, it was kept within reasonable bounds. Trump, of course, made the subtext the headline, proclaiming, "I alone can fix it," and claiming to be the smartest, toughest, wealthiest, savviest, most capable leader the world had ever seen. Like his hero, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who posed shirtless on horseback and with big game "kills," Trump took the alpha posturing to absurd lengths. Actually, if Trump had merely pretended to kill tigers, it would have been less offensive than his promises to commit war crimes (such as targeting the families of terrorists).

It remains a mystery that these absurd boasts by the most obviously insecure manchild in living memory were not met with the ridicule they deserved. But here we are. Trump's image as some sort of Rambo persists with his most perfervid followers, and even non-MAGAites continue to see him as strong.

Most Democrats have responded to the Trump alpha gorilla routine by reminding voters that he's dangerous and unhinged. It's all true. But in the process of strutting as cock of the walk, Trump has emasculated every other Republican. He may look strong, but he demands that every other Republican become weak in his service.

Men like Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have abased themselves to remain in Trump's good graces. Cruz performed one of the most humiliating kowtows, tamely accepting insults to his wife's appearance, to say nothing of Trump's lunatic assertion that Cruz's father had a role in the Kennedy assassination. They all hold their manhoods cheap. And because Trump is vindictive, petty and cruel, he couldn't resist reminding an Ohio audience that J.D. Vance, the candidate he had come to support but who had once been a Trump critic, was "kissing my ass."

At their first debate on Monday, Ryan took the shot. Reminding viewers that he had stood up to leaders of his own party including Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, he noted that Vance was such a Trump lackey that even Trump had described it in those terms. Pressing the point, he recalled that even after Trump had "taken his dignity away from him," Vance had returned to the stage to shake Trump's hand and smile for the camera. Hitting the everyman theme, Ryan offered, almost with pity, that "I don't know anybody I grew up with, I don't know anybody I went to high school with, that would allow somebody to take their dignity like that and then get back up on stage."

Ryan thus simultaneously elevated his own alpha status while reinforcing Vance's weakness. Every Republican who has bent the knee to Trump — male or female — is vulnerable in this way. Ryan has taught Democrats something.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

On The High Court, Affirmative Action Isn't Only For Republicans

On The High Court, Affirmative Action Isn't Only For Republicans

Every day since President Joe Biden reiterated his pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, conservatives have reacted with the most predictable jeers and complaints. We've heard all these tiresome whines so many times before. But for some strange reason, the right-wing worries about "reverse discrimination," tokenism and lack of qualifications only apply to minority nominees, and then only when those minority nominees are Democrats.

When former President George H.W. Bush chose Clarence Thomas to fill the high court seat left vacant by the retirement of Thurgood Marshall, did anyone actually believe that the former equal employment bureaucrat was the most qualified possible nominee? Bush denied that Thomas was a "token," but the president's endorsement of him as "best qualified at this time" seemed lukewarm at best. Setting aside Anita Hill's entirely plausible testimony about his alleged sexual harassment of her, Thomas carried a thin resume of judicial achievement and scholarship, receiving the lowest possible "qualified" rating by the American Bar Association.

But Thomas was an ideologically reliable conservative — an extremist, in fact, as we now know — and he was Black, which provided convenient cover for his hostility to civil rights. So, this "affirmative action" hire, achieved at the expense of every other possible nominee of any background, disturbed conservatives not at all. They defended him with absolute fervor and ferociously denounced any opposition as racist. (Thomas played the race card too when he accused his opponents of "a high-tech lynching.")

Bush wasn't the first Republican president to apply such an exclusionary — or was it inclusionary? — criterion to a Supreme Court appointment. His predecessor and partner Ronald Reagan had promised during the 1980 campaign to name the first woman to the court, for the utterly sensible reason that vital institutions should reflect the society they serve, including the female half. At the time, there wasn't even a women's lavatory near the courtroom.

This instance of affirmative action for women, by definition excluding all men from consideration, raised not a word of objection from Reagan's reactionary base — who disliked Sandra Day O'Connor only because they correctly suspected she wouldn't overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion rights precedent.

Five years later, Reagan got the chance to choose again when Warren Burger retired and was replaced as chief justice by William Rehnquist. The Gipper's short list was so short that it apparently included only one name he took seriously, Antonin Scalia. Aside from Scalia's rigid 17th century worldview, what recommended him was that, as Reagan put it, the judge was "of Italian extraction." Yes, the iconic conservative president based his choice on the candidate's ethnic background. Or as his former White House counsel Peter Wallison quoted him: "We don't have an Italian American on the court, so we ought to have one."

As Wallison described the process, that was the bottom line for Reagan, who asked about Scalia's ethnic background, and then spent no more than 15 minutes interviewing him for the job. "I think [Reagan] felt that it would be great to put an Italian American on the Supreme Court," Wallison later told an oral history interviewer.

Such sentiment doesn't bother me nearly as much as Scalia's "originalist" jurisprudence, which always struck me as both unfaithful to the Founders' intentions and intellectually ludicrous. What is notable, however, is that nobody ever complained that Reagan somehow violated the Constitution or American values by going ethnic — with a highly political calculation that shored up the Republican base in a conservative Catholic community.

Fulfilling the aspirations of a party constituency — and expanding the definition of American to include the previously excluded — is only bad when a Democrat does it. Republicans get away with playing ethnic political games, including the toxic versions favored by former President Donald Trump, but they shriek furiously when Democrats attempt to redress historical injustices that are no longer acceptable.

The Black female judges that Biden is considering to replace Justice Stephen Breyer are all exceptionally qualified and able. That they have ascended to this level in a society that consistently undervalues them should tell us just how qualified they are.

So, as Jordan Weissman slyly noted in Slate, it is perfectly sound for Biden to follow in Reagan's footsteps by bringing diversity to the Supreme Court with excellent female candidates of color. And if Senate Republicans have any decency — rather than their usual urge to foment racial paranoia — they would say so too.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Afghan evacuees

Forgotten Lessons Led To Tragedy In Afghanistan

The spectacle of Americans and their local allies rushing desperately to evacuate from Kabul brought to mind similar scenes from Saigon in 1975. The repetition suggested that Americans and their leaders didn't learn from the earlier experience. In fact, we did learn. But then we forgot.

Maybe the surprise is not that we had to rediscover the difficulty of extricating our people and allies after giving up on an unsuccessful war. Maybe the surprise is that there was such a long interval between the two debacles. For a while, we avoided such failures, and not by accident.

In the 1980s, liberals depicted President Ronald Reagan as a trigger-happy warmonger. But his two terms stand out as a time when the United States, haunted by Vietnam, largely rejected direct military intervention abroad. He did dispatch Marines to Beirut as part of a peacekeeping force — but when a terrorist attack killed 241 American service members, he quickly withdrew our forces.

Reagan's Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger laid out a set of principles for deciding when to go to war. He argued that "vital national interests" must be at stake and that we must have clear objectives and the means to attain them.

By 1992, the "Weinberger Doctrine" was incorporated into the "Powell Doctrine" by Gen. Colin Powell, who served President George H.W. Bush as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among his contributions was the rule that we have "a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement."

This approach didn't mean the U.S. would never go to war: We did so in 1983 in Grenada to topple a Marxist government and rescue American students. We did so in 1989 in Panama to remove a dictator blamed for drug trafficking. Most notably, we did so in 1991 to evict Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait.

Whether these wars were wise and necessary is subject to debate. But in each case, we did what we set out to do and got out.

Success, however, bred amnesia. President George W. Bush had little choice but to invade Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden used it as a base for the 9/11 attacks. But once the Taliban were defeated and al-Qaeda was on the run, Bush chose to stay in an effort to cultivate freedom, democracy, and prosperity. It was the antithesis of the Powell Doctrine: an ill-defined mission that lay beyond our core competence and was not essential to our security — all without an exit strategy.

It has been clear for years that our efforts in Afghanistan were not working. But three presidents chose to prolong our involvement rather than admit futility.

What we learned when President Joe Biden refused to continue the war is that our failure exceeded our worst assumptions. We didn't know what was really going on in Afghanistan, and we didn't know we didn't know. We were clueless in Kabul.

The sudden, complete disintegration of the government revealed that it was no more viable than a brain-dead patient on life support. All Biden did was pull the plug.

It's fair to say that his administration should have been better prepared for the collapse so it could manage a more orderly withdrawal. But as Texas A&M security scholar Jasen Castillo tweeted, "There is no pretty way to leave a losing war." The nature of wars is that winners dictate the final terms. And the Taliban won this war.

It's commonly assumed that we could have preserved the previous status quo by maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan. But by May 2020, long before Biden arrived, the government had seen its control dwindle to 30 percent of the country's 407 districts, with the Taliban controlling 20 percent — more than at any time since the U.S. invasion.

Back then, one expert told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, "The Taliban has so far been successful in seizing and contesting ever larger swaths of rural territory, to the point where they have now almost encircled six to eight of the country's major cities and are able to routinely sever connections via major roads." Sound familiar? The longer we stayed, the greater the risk of being forced into an even bigger commitment — with no hope of victory.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus said to a reporter, "Tell me how this ends?" Before we embark on a war, not after, is the time to answer that question. If we don't have an answer, the enemy will.

Follow Steve Chapman on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com