At a campaign meet-and-greet on Monday, Congressional candidate Michelle Rollins expressed her opposition to extending unemployment benefits, suggesting that they discouraged unemployed Delawareans from looking for jobs. Her comments, along with similarly out-of-touch comments from other candidates, have gotten wide notice from local and national publications this week.
Audio from the clip can be found here.
Washington Post -
Let’s call it the “Let Them Eat Want Ads” Caucus — those candidates and public officials who argue that unemployment benefits are problematic because they discourage people from seeking jobs… And let’s add another Republican to that caucus: Candidate Michele Rollins, who’s running for Mike Castle’s open House seat in Delaware… Rollins, who’s running in a contested race against green technology exec John Carney, was asked by a constituent if she would have voted to extend unemployment benefits. She suggested she wouldn’t, claiming that “for someone who hasn’t worked in two years” it’s “pretty hard to get energized to go back and look for a job.”
DelawareLiberal.net -
So listen up Delawareans — Michelle Rollins thinks that the reason you are unemployed for almost two years is that you are happy collecting a government check. Not that her party crashed the economy and there are way fewer houses and buildings being constructed; or that manufacturing and retail jobs have disappeared because people are still cautious about buying things. Know that her agenda if elected would be to make sure that the working families hit hard by the repub-engineered recession would be thrown an anchor.
Washington Monthly -
The moral of the story seems to be that conservative Republicans just don’t seem to like the unemployed. If every American who’s had to rely on jobless benefits since the start of the recession was poised to vote in November, the GOP would be in a bit of panic right now.”
Mother Jones -
Any chance of Rollins winning over the 8.5 percent of Delaware citizens who are unemnployed just plummeted. Indeed, I’ll bet that those 37,000 or so jobless people in her state would take offense to her claim that unemployment insurance is the same as “pay[ing] people to do nothing” and that aid makes people “do nothing for a long time.” I’ll bet most of them would tell Rollins they’re sending out resumes every week, showing up at job fairs, dropping in on employers to ask about openings—hardly sitting around and continuing “to do nothing.”
Bluestem Prairie wonders if Minnesota congressional candidate Randy Demmer would join Rollins in the “Let Them Eat Want Ads” caucus, if both were to be elected.
