What Does It Mean When Politicians Say They are 'Laser-focused'?
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer this week said that “Democrats are laser-focused” on “taking aim at insulin costs…lowering prices at the grocery store…building on historic job growth” and “expanding opportunity for the middle class.”
While one could easily dismiss this multi-pronged (but still “laser-focused”) statement as empty political rhetoric, such proclamations often indicate something more meaningful. They suggest where politicians recognize they are falling short of public expectations, requiring their increased legislative, or at least rhetorical, attention.
As logic suggests, politicians typically limit their “laser focus” to a single key concern. That was the case in the aftermath of the Great Recession, when Democrats regularly emphasized their laser-like focus on job creation. For example, then-Vice President Joe Biden said of President Obama: "With everything else he has on his plate, his laser focus has been jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs." Biden’s defensive rhetoric stemmed from the fact that at that moment 49 of 50 states had lost jobs since the Democrats’ 2009 stimulus law, despite their promises that legislation would create millions of new jobs.
Following the subsequent enactment of Obamacare and continued disappointment on the job creation front, even fellow Democrats openly mocked such laser-focus claims. In May 2010, Roll Call reported on congressional Democrats openly complaining the Obama Administration simply hadn’t done enough to prioritize job creation. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) put it bluntly: “We were told we would focus like a laser after December. Well, we haven’t exactly been focused like a laser on jobs.” DeFazio, who favored job creation in transportation industries through a new infrastructure bill, lamented Obama’s focusing instead on health care information technology and energy-related jobs. “Those are fantasy jobs,” he scorned. Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) questioned whether the administration was delaying spending to boost Obama’s 2012 reelection bid, to the disadvantage of members up for reelection in 2010. Referring to the administration, Hastings said “They want to spend it in 2011, because 2012 is there. Well hell, we want to spend it right now because we are in the bubble.”
Indeed, in the ensuing 2010 midterm elections, congressional Democrats suffered an electoral “shellacking,” as President Obama famously put it. That indicates that Biden’s claims of the Obama administration’s supposed laser-like focus on jobs were unconvincing not only to members of his own party on Capitol Hill, but more importantly to the public. Yet some leaders pressed on with similar rhetoric, with Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) stating in 2011 “[t]he president is focused like a laser on passing the American Jobs Act, on making sure we put people back to work.” In reality, it was just the latest in a long line of rhetorical “pivots” back to jobs for an administration that clearly had other priorities.
For his part, President Biden continues to profess his own laser-like focus on jobs. A Biden campaign ad declared in 2020 that “I’ll be laser-focused on working families.” And the President stated in May 2021 that “My laser focus is on growing the economy and creating jobs.” That was while pitching his “American Jobs Plan” – a title reminiscent of the “American Jobs Act” that Rep. Wasserman Schultz claimed was President Obama’s laser-like focus a decade earlier. Meanwhile actual job creation following Democrats’ March 2021 American Rescue Plan has fallen millions of jobs short of their predictions – which is presumably why “job growth” remains on Senator Schumer’s list.
Pledging a laser focus is a rhetorical device politicians in both parties regularly deploy to indicate issues they claim have their undivided attention. But such statements also indicate where elected officials recognize they are vulnerable, since public expectations are not being met. Viewed in that light, the fact that the Senate Majority Leader sees multiple issues on which Democrats must be “laser-focused” is a sign of trouble ahead. And that’s without considering the important concerns that didn’t make his list, including record gas prices, the current war in Ukraine, and a possible resurgence of the coronavirus. Maybe on some happier day Senator Schumer will be able to repeat his far simpler guidance from late 2010: “Focus on the middle class like a laser.”
Matt Weidinger is a Rowe Fellow in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
