With the unemployment rate soaring in 10.2 percent in Friday's
report on October, two old hands in the Washington press corps appeared
on Sunday morning shows where they asserted that means we need another
stimulus bill and/or the problem is the current "stimulus" bill wasn't
big enough. On This Week, ABC News vet Sam Donaldson maintained "we're going to have to have more stimulus, more spending."
Over on NBC's Meet the Press, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne,
a former Washington correspondent for the New York Times before
covering politics for the Post, complained: "The problem is the stimulus was too small,
and they compromised it down and so you had less effect. I mean, the
fact is these numbers would be a lot worse without the stimulus."
Donaldson contended:
Paul Krugman is often on this program, a New York Times columnist, and I think he's right, we're going to have to have more stimulus, more spending. You say, well that's terrible. Frank [Luntz], you say you hand it to the Republicans. Well alright, so we don't come out of the recession. Oh, good. Tremendous. In other words, which is worse? More spending, more debt - which we're going to take care off - but we come out of the recession because of it, or let's just stay wth a lot of people out of work.
Later in the roundtable on the November 8 program, Donaldson lamented the loss of liberal Republicans, lecturing George Will:
When I came to the town, there were people in the Senate, Republicans Leverett Saltonstall, John Sherman Cooper, Clifford Case, later Tom Kegal [?], Hatfield from Oregon, Chafee - where are they today? They're not there because your party has driven out the moderates from the party. And you can't have a party that represents this country with the kind of people that now seem to be the voices of the Republicans.
I have no idea who "Tom Kegal" is and see no one by any name close to that in the list of all past U.S. Senators [1].
- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center