I'm going to take a few hits myself for putting "recovery" in quotation marks in that headline. I mean, really, am I trying to do the Republicans' work for them? What's with all the doom-and-gloom just three months before the mid-term elections?
It's called reality. And, no, I'm not trying to help the Republicans. The last thing we need are more of them doing their best to make life even harder on the bottom 80 percent of the population, pushing austerity on everybody but their well-to-do cronies, telling out-of-work people to get off unemployment benefits (if they are lucky enough to have them) and find one of those jobs they seem to think are plentiful if all the lazybones would just get off their duffs and look for them.
Nobody needs remind me of how much worse things would be if President McCain and Vice President Palin were running the show. I know. If there had been no stimulus, another 2 million or 3 million Americans would be counted in the unemployment statistics right now. This is not irrelevant. Americans need to hear this and hear it often in the run-up to November.
However, telling people - whose confidence in the economy has plunged - that things could be worse is terrible messaging. Not because it's untrue. But rather because, when you're out of work, or soon expect to be, or are just worried because the situation seems so unstable, having somebody say things could be worse amounts to a slap in the face. And telling them - as many Democrats are doing in variety of ways, directly and indirectly - that immediately controlling deficits matters as much or more than speeding up economic growth is like a punch in the nose.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/7/17/885058/-The-recovery-takes-a-few-more-hits