It was a decline that we could finally get excited about. After months of hovering at or near 9 percent, the unemployment rate finally dropped to a much-improved, albeit still unhealthy, 8.6 percent — the lowest since March 2009. With 120,000 jobs added to the economy in November, politicians finally have some positive news to trumpet.
For the most part, though, they didn’t. Of course, the drop made international headlines and official press releases. Everyone with even a peripheral interest in news heard about it. But that was not the doing of politicians, who were noticeably and uncharacteristically quiet in their responses to the decline. Absent were the droning buzz and unveiled insults that so often accompany these types of jobs reports. The feistiness and shameless self-promotion of previous unemployment aftermaths were also conspicuously missing this time around.
The silence says more than any canned stump speech could. For all the campaign talk of wanting to fix the economy first and foremost, it’s pretty apparent that this isn’t quite the news that many were hoping for. The stagnated jobs bill discussions and frighteningly down-to-the-wire debt-ceiling decision last summer have made this clear. Some simply do not want the unemployment rate to go down. For a sizable amount of our elected officials and aspirants, the economy is important primarily in terms of its effect on their electoral chances.
And for an out-of-power party, the best thing that can seemingly happen in an election is sometimes the worst that can happen for the country. The lingeringly high unemployment helped John Boehner and the gang take the House last year, just as the financial meltdown of 2008 propelled President Barack Obama to electoral victory.
But there’s a difference between benefiting from the side effects of failure and actively seeking to obstruct progress and wreak havoc. In recent years, and especially since Obama took office, politics has shifted toward the mentality that the entire nation’s loss is one party or candidate’s gain. And more importantly, politicians have become all too aware that they don’t have to leave failure up to chance; they can make it happen themselves.
What we need to realize is that we can make things happen, too. Some politicians will always put their own interests ahead of their constituents’ — it’s just the nature of the game. But that’s only because we allow it. We have the power and responsibility to change things for the good of the country. The best way to do that is not on the streets, but at the ballot box, where the fates of so many candidates lie at our fingertips.
These past few years, it has become clear that a politician’s top priority is to keep his or her job. We can and should take advantage of that and hold accountable anyone who ignores the 13.3 million jobless in this country. Ultimately, the voters are the bosses.