From Special Report with Bret Baier | Friday, September 7, 2012
On the jobs report that came out Friday:
These are terrible numbers. First of all, to have increase of less than 100,000 [jobs] — where you need at least twice that much to keep up with the population increase — is disastrous. And the only reason that the rate hovers around eight percent and went down slightly is because of the drop-out [of people from the work-force].
Think about this. If you take all the people who dropped out of the [work-] force (stopped looking out of despair) for the last year, and you calculate them as if they stayed in the [work-] force — still looking, not employed but still looking — the unemployment rate would be 9.1 percent. That is a truer reflection of what it’s been like over the last year, without the distortion of the way that we calculate unemployment. And it is just unbelievably awful.
And that is why the administration now is trying — as always — to change the subject.
On the critique that Governor Romney has not offered enough specifics in his economic plan:
Republicans have offered so many specifics that the Democrats have been on the attack on the Romney-Ryan plan endlessly since the Ryan appointment and before. They [Romney and Ryan] have been tremendously detailed in their program about Medicare… taxes and spending.
Obama offered nothing. You can say you don’t offer [details] in a speech. He hasn’t offered anything anywhere. He has been in office for a term. Has he offered anything on Medicare? Nothing. He himself said on July 11 last year [that] you could raise all the taxes you want, it won’t change the fact that Medicare is becoming insolvent.
Has he done anything on Social Security or [other] entitlements? Has he done anything on tax reform? He had the audacity to refer to, as he called it, “my own debt commission” — which he rejected. It is shameless….
On the winner of the Democratic convention:
Winner is the vice president. He gave the speech of his life. If you take away the last 15 minutes of partisan hackery, the part he did about the bailout, [his] feeling for the ordinary American, was slightly unctuous, I would say, but it had feeling, emotion and resonance.
I think it rescued his reputation, which was rapidly heading into being irrelevant — sort of the crazy uncle in the attic.
He did himself a world of good.