Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod denied using the term “recovery summer” in 2010 to describe what was happening with the economy.
This is half true, as the Washington Examiner explains:
David Axelrod promised big results from the Recovery Act in the summer of 2010. With the economy still weak two years later, he denied ever touting the recovery summer during an interview this morning.
“I wasn’t running around saying anything that other than we were going to be persistent, that it took years to get into this mess, it was going to take years to get [out],” Axelrod said this morning when Fox News’ Chris Wallace recalled that he was “running around, talking about recovery summer” in 2010.
“Well, you should show me the tape of me saying that,” Axelrod countered.
Um…OK, David. You’re half right.
“[M]any of the Recovery Act projects around the country are taking hold this summer, by design, that will involve a lot of private industry construction and so on,” Axelrod said on Meet the Press in June of 2010. ” So the combination of those things will help, and we hope the Congress will act expeditiously to get that done.”
Clearly, Axelrod didn’t use the term, “recovery summer,” but he did say that a recovery would be “taking hold” that summer.
In November of 2010, Axelrod added that “we have a recovery” during another Meet the Press interview that saw him acknowledge that the economy was still weak.
In June 2010, by the way, Axelrod — like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and President Obama after him — blamed the enduring weakness of the economy on state and local governments.
The fact that we’re splitting hairs about this is pathetic. There was no “recovery summer” — there hasn’t been a recovery at all. It is arguable whether the US isn’t back in a recession already.
Axelrod is trying to say that he didn’t overpromise on the recovery. I call bull on that. From the moment the Obama team took office, they have overpromised on every single major piece of legislation, including the stim bill — which was supposed to bring unemployment down to 6% — Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank FinReg legislation, other stimulus measures like the extension of unemployment benefits — the list goes on and on.
Between the Fed and the Obama administration, trillions of dollars have been pumped into the economy with literally nothing to show for it. In fact, it should be argued by Mr. Romney that the president may have inherited a mess, but his policies have made things worse.
President Obama is out on the hustings saying in so many words that recovery is just around the corner — that is, when he talks about the economy at all. But economic reports in recent months show the opposite; that the country is teetering on the edge of another downturn and that it wouldn’t take much — an oil shock, the collapse of the euro — to send us over the cliff and back into recession. For Axelrod to claim he hasn’t been overselling recovery is a diversion. Arguing about what he said in 2010 masks the fact that the administration’s economic policies have failed and that Obama is bereft of ideas on how to fix it.
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