In April, job growth in the United States wasn’t awful — more than a quarter of a million new jobs were created — but it fell short of expectations. The Republican National Committee, of course, wasted little time in blaming President Joe Biden.
A month later, the employment market bounced back — more than 600,000 jobs were created in May — but the RNC slammed the Democratic White House anyway.
This got a little weird in July, when the economy created more than a million jobs, and the RNC decided not to bother issuing any statement at all about the good news.
All of which helped lay the groundwork for Friday’s encouraging economic news, which the RNC struggled to criticize:
Today, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Ronna McDaniel released the following statement on the October jobs report. “After months of failed policies and bad jobs reports, the one person who does not deserve credit for creating jobs is Joe Biden….”
First, the idea that we’ve seen months of “bad jobs reports” is curious. In September, for example, the RNC said job creation was “disastrous.” But based on the latest data, there were 312,000 new jobs created in September. In 40 of the 48 months that Donald Trump was president, the economy failed to generate this many jobs. Does the Republican National Committee see his presidency as having been “disastrous” for job creation?
A month earlier, the economy created 483,000 jobs. The month before that, it was over 1 million. The month before that, the total was 962,000. Where exactly are these months of “bad jobs reports” hiding?
Second, Republicans can’t have it both ways. The RNC has spent much of the year connecting Biden’s policies to job growth over and over and over again. The party effectively told the public that there’s a direct line between the White House’s agenda and U.S. job creation.
As regular readers may recall, this was apparently based on the idea that the U.S. job market would continue to fall short for the indefinite future. This was an unfortunate assumption: The economy has already created nearly 6 million jobs this year, more than the first two years of the Trump era combined. And wouldn’t you know it, when jobs reports are fantastic, the Republican Party decides the connection between the presidency and the economy is severed — at least until the next jobs report, at which point the RNC will again consider applying its “heads I win, tails you lose” principles. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut added, “I’ll save you some time. The RNC believes Joe Biden has 100% control of the economy when things go bad and 0% control of the economy when things go right.” We’re left with a question for Republicans that the party may struggle to answer: If the Democratic White House’s economic policies are so awful, how does the RNC and its allies explain the 5.8 million jobs created so far this year and the fact that the unemployment rate is down to 4.6 percent?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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