Very Bad News on the Jobs Front

Preliminary figures show only 54,000 jobs were created last month, much lower than the 160,000 economists predicted, extremely lower than the 200,000 jobs per month needed just to keep up with population growth, and devastatingly lower than the 400,000+ needed to recoup the jobs lost since the economic collapse started in 2007.

Yet the tea-bagger led House of Representatives' idea of a jobs growth program consists of a 10 page pamphlet containing large font and lots of pretty pictures, yet no solid, workable ideas of how to get businesses to start hiring again.

The Democratic-led Senate seems to be paralyzed on any issues that come before it, let alone a jobs bill, as they are shivering at the possibility of losing their slim majority there next year.

And President Obama, despite this unexpected upward tick in unemployment, continues to keep his economic team in place; an economic team that, as Bill Clinton's underlings, helped draft laws, signed by Mr. Clinton and abused by George W. Bush, that drove us over the proverbial cliff.

It is plainly obvious that previous economic policies aren't working, and that new, bold leadership is needed, both at the United States Treasury and on the economic side of the President's cabinet.

Mark my words, if unemployment remains stuck in the 9% area all the way to November of 2012, or if, ugh, it climbs higher, then Mr. Obama is ripe for the picking.  And if you think things are bad now, today's economy will be a cakewalk compared to the Bush-redux policies of a "President Romney" or a "President Palin."

UPDATE: Nate Silver suggests the unemployment rate isn't necessarily a sure fire predictor of presidential re-election (with re-election defined as either incumbent candidate or incumbent party).  His argument is solid, and one hopes beyond hope that Americans will remember that it was the previous administration's policies that drove us into the abyss, and that if weren't for President Obama's policies, we'd be smack dab in the middle of a second Great Depression.  Voters did, after all, re-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, and a third time in 1940, despite unemployment numbers well above 10% because they remembered vividly that 12 years of Republican rule prior to FDR left the entire country in ruins.

But...

Barack Obama, while pushing through policies that staunched the bleeding, had his hands tied by a rather unscrupulous Republican minority in the U.S. Senate, with the hapless Harry Reid allowing them to filibuster every piece of proposed economic growth legislation.  Had the President made a strong, loud push for such a jobs bill - had he gone to-to-toe with the Boner and McConnell - Americans might be more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt next year.

But the President has been largely silent on the issue, refusing time and again to explain to the American people (a la Reagan in 1981) that the mess left on his desk by the previous Republican-led administration was a mountainous pile of diarrhea, and that it will take very slow growth over a period of ten years to get us back on track.  It is my sincere belief that because of that refusal to explain things to the American people, if unemployment isn't at 8% and trending downward in November, 2012, the only thing American voters in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will see at the end of a brutal campaign by the Republican ticket, is a black Democrat who was unable to right the economic ship of state; and, despite their reservations of Republican economics, enough people in those states could easily hand the Electoral College to the GOP ticket.