UNEMPLOYMENT….The unemployment rate jumped to 6.1% last month. The chart on the right is courtesy of Brad DeLong, who says simply, “It’s already as deep in the unemployment metric as the 1980 recession.”
Which, of course, makes it all the more remarkable that the Republican Party just held a 4-day nationally televised convention with dozens of speakers and managed to only barely even mention the economy. John McCain finally got around to it last night, briefly mentioning “tough times” and then devoting a few sentences to the subject, but that was about it. And his heart pretty obviously wasn’t in it even for those few sentences.
If McCain loses in November, that’s going to be one of the biggest reasons why. Sarah Palin aside, he simply doesn’t sound like he understands what’s really going on out in the outside world, and when he’s forced to talk about it he has nothing to say. Republican orthodoxy forbids any serious response — forbids, in fact, even the possibility of an effective response other than yet another round of tax cuts — so it’s best to mutter a few bromides and move on. And that’s what he does.
