Now Democrats to Focus on Jobs!

President Obama was elected on economic issues, but the idiot's wasted most of the year on his socialist takeover of the healthcare system, and not to mention his world apology tour for the "evils" of the United States.

So, maybe the dumb Democrats are finally getting a clue. From the Washinton Post, "Entering an election year, Democrats sharpen focus on jobs: Some fear that the most basic of voter issues has been crowded out":

President Obama's renewed focus on the economy underscores an elemental truth of politics. For all the attention the White House and Congress have given to health care and Afghanistan this fall, no problem poses a greater political threat to the Democrats in 2010 than joblessness and slow economic growth.

The clamor in Congress for more attention on the economy has been rising by the week as Democrats look to the opening of a midterm election year with unemployment at 10 percent and forecast to stay in that range for some months. The White House, too, has gotten the message. For the third time in six days, President Obama will put employment at the forefront of his agenda, with a speech Tuesday outlining new ideas to create jobs.

"We've made a huge amount of progress in terms of turning off the flood of job loss," said White House senior adviser David Axelrod. "But there's also a big hole. Over the course of this recession, 8 million people lost jobs. That's a lot of people. We've got our work cut out for us. We're moving in the right direction, but we've got to make more progress."

But will the Democrats' attention to the economy prove to be little more than an exercise in checking a box or the beginning of a sustained and determined focus on a problem that many Americans fear has gotten too little attention from their elected leaders? Will the economy have to compete in the coming year with issues like climate change and immigration reform, which Obama has promised to push once the health-care debate ends, or will the administration delay shifting to those problems until it has dealt more successfully with the economy?

Democratic strategists are keenly aware of the potential problem for their party. "There is a sense that we pick up that people are not only worried about the substantive issue, but they're not sure that Washington is focused on that issue and they'd like to see Washington focused much more on that issue," said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster.

Although the unemployment rate ticked down from 10.2 percent to 10 percent in the latest report, released Friday, about one-sixth of the workforce is either out of work or underemployed. Not since the early 1980s has the jobless rate hit levels this high, and Republicans suffered major losses in the 1982 midterm election. Democrats could suffer the same fate next year.

"Democrats are now scrambling to catch up, not only with public concern but also the facts on the ground, which are pretty dismal," said William Galston of the Brookings Institution, where Obama will speak Tuesday. "This job market has deteriorated far more than anyone thought possible even a year ago."

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