By JANE SASSEEN
Yahoo! News
With the economy clearly the big issue on voters’ minds, Democrats and Republicans alike are ramping up the rhetoric with only six weeks to go before critical midterm elections that will determine who controls Congress.
Yet Americans surveyed in the first of a series of ABC News/Yahoo! News polls, released early Tuesday, have a message for both sides: Many respondents — including a clear majority of independents, who have provided the critical swing votes in many recent elections — have little confidence in either party’s ability to do more for the economy.
Since Labor Day, President Barack Obama has focused intently on the economy, proposing a host of stimulus measures and warning in a series of combative speeches that a win for Republicans will mean returning to the Bush-era economic policies that the president says caused the economy to tank in the first place. (Read an ABC News story on Obama's new plan to create jobs.)
"Something that took 10 years to create is going to take a little more time to solve," Obama said at a Sept. 20 town-hall-style meeting broadcast by cable channel CNBC. Later, he said that “the most important thing we can do” to address the deficit and high unemployment is to spur growth in the economy. "What we can't do is go back to the same old things we were doing."
Republican leaders, meanwhile, continue to hammer home the message that two years of Democratic efforts to bolster the economy have failed, with little to show for the hundreds of billions of dollars spent but a soaring deficit, stagnant growth and still-sky-high joblessness.
“The American people are clamoring for a focus on jobs and righting our economy,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a Sept. 16 statement. “Instead, for two years the president and the majority in Congress have veered off to the far left and pursued their own liberal wish-list agenda.” (Watch ABC News video profile of Mitch McConnell.)
No comments:
Post a Comment