Charles P. Pierce discusses job creation and the slow and steady pace of President Obama vs. the radical fiction of a Willard Romney / George W. Bush II presidency:

The new job numbers should have the White House stowing away the oxygen tanks for a month or so, at any rate. The economy added 163,000 new jobs, and Americans are building and selling more stuff, and all this is what you want to hear if you’re a president who wants to be president again, and particularly if you’re running against a fella whose entire tax plan just now was left by various independent experts as little more than a pile of smoking meat by the side of the road. When you’re reduced to trying to cast the Tax Policy Center — which is so wonkish that it makes the National Science Foundation look like the back rows at a Pantera concert — as a passel of wild-eyed Alinskyite radicals, you’re pretty much admitting that you’ve lost the argument.

Unemployment ticked up a little, but remains below 9 percent, and, yes, it’s damn tragic that we celebrate that as though it were, well, something to celebrate. Nevertheless, this is the best week the president’s had on the numbers in a very long time.

Is this a mixed blessing for the president? Of course, it is. That’s the only kind of blessing that’s left, given what was done to the economy, and his own dilatory caution in addressing the magnitude of the crisis out in the country. And the status quo, in terms of the human cost of what is increasingly looking like the new normal, is both unsustainable and indefensible. But the numbers are moving, and the president is committed, for good or ill, to creating measured progress back from a precipitous crisis. His is the slow and steady pace…

[...] It’s Willard Romney who is the get-rich-quick huckster now. He is making the fundamentally radical proposal — a radicalism limned precisely by the analysis of his tax plan — that we return to the policies that created the debacle in the first place, that we abandon patience for the quick-fix nostrums of supply-side theory and for the even more profound poisons being peddled by Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, that we abandon the ant for the grasshopper. Rommey is the candidate of the unlimited credit card, of the magic asterisk, of the underpants gnome. He’s the candidate of crazy risk and unlikely reward. You want to look at a radical, don’t look at the Tax Policy Center. Look at the guy with the dancing horse.

via: questionall

Related: Romney’s “Plan for a Stronger Middle-Class” wouldn’t create ANY American jobs