According to this article, President Obama says that his stimulus bill “has worked as intended.”

President Barack Obama said his $787 billion stimulus bill “has worked as intended” as he pushed back against Republican criticism that his recovery program has failed to rescue the economy.

“It has already extended unemployment insurance and health insurance to those who have lost their jobs in this recession,” Obama, who is traveling today in Ghana, said in his weekly Saturday radio and Web address. “It has delivered $43 billion in tax relief to American working families and business.”

That’s an outright fabrication. It doesn’t resemble the truth. When he pushed the bill, he said, at various times, that it would create either 3,000,000 new jobs, 3,500,000 new jobs or 4,000,000 new jobs. I don’t recall the Senate holding the vote open for Sherrod Brown so he could cast the deciding vote so they could extend unemployment and Medicaid benefits.

I’ve watched Hannity play the tape of President Obama saying that failing to pass the stimulus bill would cause unemployment to rise above 8 percent. You don’t stabilize unemployment by extending umemployment and Medicaid benefits. That only happens when the economy is creating jobs.

“We’re moving in the right direction,” Obama said. “We must let it work the way it’s supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity.”

I might buy that if the economy was shedding 75,000-100,000 jobs a month. It isn’t. It’s been shedding approximately 500,000 jobs a month. That doesn’t sound like we’re heading in the right direction to me. Quite the opposite, actually.

If I were a strategist for the NRCC or NRSC, I’d be creating an advertisement contrasting Rasmussen’s latest polling with President Obama’s statements. Here’s what Rasmussen’s latest polling shows:

Sixty-two percent (62%) of Americans now oppose federal government bailouts for states like California that are experiencing major budget problems.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 20% of adults favor bailing out financially troubled states. Nineteen percent (19%) are not sure which course is best.

That’s a 3:1 ration against bailing out states. There isn’t an appetite for more massive spending outlays at this point. I’d doubt that the average person will differentiate between bailing states out and extending unemployment and Medicaid benefits. The average taxpayer just notices that it’s just a bunch more spending that they’ll have to pay for.

This set of statistics is the most important set in terms of the 2010 elections:

Eighty-two percent (82%) of Republicans and 61% of adults not affiliated with either major political party oppose federal bailout help for states with budget problems. A plurality (42%) of Democrats agree, but 31% think bailing out the states is a good idea.

If I’m a Democratic strategist, I’d be worried when 4 of 10 Democrats like the bailouts and 6 in 10 independents dislike the bailouts. That’s a huge red flag to me.

President Obama is a gifted speech reader but he isn’t a persuasive person to people who pay attention to facts. He’s left with a difficult task at this point. He knows that he can’t lose more credibility on the economy because that’s a potentially fatal problem for his administration. His only option is to try and convince people that things aren’t as bad as they are.

I don’t think that President Pied Piper is capable of changing people’s minds on that.

Technorati: Economy, Stimulus, Bailouts, President Obama, Unemployment, Medicaid, Polling, Independents, Election 2010

Cross-posted at California Conservative