Republicans Are So Desperate, They're Blaming Obama for Income Inequality
On Monday, President Barack Obama’s favorability rating hit 50 in the Gallup tracking poll for the first time since June 2013, with his unfavorable rating at 45 percent. That’s a 22-point improvement since the midterm elections, when Obama’s approval rating was 39 percent and his disapproval rating was 56 percent. What’s caused this turnaround isn’t entirely clear. Obama’s recent actions on immigration, climate change, Cuba, and community college probably helped. But the economy, particularly lower gas prices, is likely a much more important factor. Americans, for the first time since before the Great Recession, are optimistic about the direction of the economy.
That has put Republicans in a very tough spot. Their reaction to the State of the Union last week, while predictable, revealed that their current attacks against the president no longer work. They can’t simply point to a terrible economy and high unemployment rate as indicative that the president’s policies have failed. After all, the unemployment rate is down to 5.6 percent.
But over the past week we have gotten a taste of what the new Republican attacks on the Obama economy will look like. One argument posits that Obama’s policies are responsible for the decline in the labor force participation rate. I took that one apart last week. Over the weekend, though, Republicans used a different attack: Obama is responsible for increased inequality. “Frankly, the president's policies have made income inequality worse,” House Speaker John Boehner said on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” citing Obamacare as a reason for growing inequality. Other Republicans, like Mitt Romney, have suddenly discovered that inequality is a pressing problem.
The GOP’s goal is to show that they care about lower- and middle-class Americans and to convince them that the Democrats don’t care about them. But that's all this is—strategic political rhetoric. They have no evidence for their claim that Obama has increased income inequality. It may have worsened during his presidency, but it undoubtedly would have been much worse without him.
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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120855/republicans-blame-obama-income-inequality-ignoring-recession
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