Steele: Obama policies alone preventing economic recovery

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said Friday that only one thing is to blame for the continuing economic downturn: the Obama administration's "government-run liberal" policies. 

Steele released a statement after the Labor Department reported that unemployment remained at 10 percent in December for a second-straight month -- worse than many analysts expected.

"President Obama’s singular focus on enacting his government-run liberal policies are single handily [sic] preventing this return," Steele said. "It's time for President Obama to ...finally do what he should have been doing over the past year – put his full and undivided attention on fixing our economy."

Republicans looked to play off possible Democratic anxieties after the it was reported the economy lost 85,000 jobs in December. Democrats face a tough political environment in this fall's midterm elections amidst a poorly performing economy.

"A jobless recovery is a far cry from what the American people were promised last winter when Washington Democrats jammed through a trillion-dollar 'stimulus' that they said would create jobs ‘immediately,'" House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) spokesman Don Stewart wrote in an e-mail that the recovery would be hastened "if the administration and Democrats in Congress would stop piling trillions in new debt on [people's] backs, stop trying to pass massive government expansions and stop spending like it’s free money."

Democrats have pointed to moderating job losses in consecutive months that the economy is slowly but surely pulling itself out of its doldrums.

Christina Romer, who heads the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote a blog post Friday morning pointing out that the economy lost 139,000 jobs in September and 127,000 in October as opposed to 85,000 last month.

---