Politics & Power Quote by Sidney Blumenthal

Blumenthal’s line isn’t trying to persuade with poetry; it’s trying to win the argument with a scoreboard. The blunt symmetry - “22 million” versus “3 million” - turns the messy sprawl of economic history into a binary moral tale: competence versus failure, stewardship versus sabotage. It works because it mimics the way politics is actually consumed, not in policy briefs but in comparative snapshots that feel like common sense.

The specific intent is opposition messaging with journalistic authority as a sheen. By naming “President Clinton” and then reducing “Bush” to a surname, Blumenthal quietly frames one era as an institution and the other as a person to blame. Jobs become the master metric, crowding out inconvenient qualifiers: what kind of jobs, wage growth, labor-force participation, the lag between policy and outcomes, the role of the dot-com boom and bust, 9/11, and the structural shifts already underway. That omission isn’t a flaw; it’s the point. The line is built for repetition.

The subtext is a warning about governance style. Clinton-era centrism is implied as pragmatic and growth-friendly; Bush-era conservatism is implied as ideologically reckless or inattentive to the everyday economy. Context matters: Blumenthal, a Clinton ally turned critic of Bush, is speaking from inside the partisan-industrial complex where “objective” numbers are ammunition. The move is to make economic memory feel simple enough to be undeniable, so the listener’s political conclusion arrives wearing the mask of math.