Obama clarifies: Economy 'not doing fine'
President Barack Obama meant to shore up his economic standing with his press conference Friday, but he ended up in fast retreat.
Obama’s comment —that “the private sector is doing fine” — immediately became a flashpoint for Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans, who quickly attacked the president for being out of touch about the state of the economy.
Within hours, he was backtracking, telling reporters gathered in the Oval Office for a photo spray for his meeting with the president of the Philippines that “It is absolutely clear the economy is not doing fine.”
Obama’s underlying point — that private-sector job growth is outpacing austerity-sapped public payrolls — but saying the underlying private-sector economy is “fine” contradicts the consensus of economists who say this is the weakest recovery from a recession in modern American history.
And it plays into the central Mitt Romney talking point: That Obama is a European-style socialist hopelessly out-of-touch with the free enterprise system.
Plus, it provides a bookend to Romney’s own big gaffe on the economy, his off-key declaration that “corporations are people.”
“For the president of the United States to stand up and say the private sector is doing fine is going to go down in history as an extraordinary miscalculation and misunderstanding by a president who’s out of touch,” Mitt Romney said at a midday rally in Iowa.
