Chip Bok's Bokbluster

Well, it’s finally not about him. That was President Obama’s reaction to the Republican wave that swept Democratic governors and senators out to sea.

He said the voters’ message is that they want to “get stuff done” and “make Washington work”.

Daniel Henninger sees it differently. He thinks the “labor force participation rate” killed the Dems:

Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal government’s October employment report, on the eve of the election:

“In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.”

Henninger says the average economic growth rate since WWII is 3.3%:

Here are the growth rates for each year of the Obama presidency (World Bank data):

2009: -2.8%; 2010: 2.5%; 2011: 1.8%; 2012: 2.8%; 2013: 1.9%

You preside over that performance, you lose. The 2014 growth uptick arrived too late to save the Democrats.

About Him

Before the election Obama said it would be about him, his policies, actually. Now he says it was about Republicans working with him. My friend Steve Kelly nailed the Obamian Attitude with this cartoon. Click the thumbnail.