Go Big Or Go Home

There are two schools of thought on what President Obama should do for his jobs program announcement next month:  One, that he should announce a major new jobs initiative to help the millions of long-term unemployed and dare the GOP to block it (and they will and nobody will receive any help at all), or two, that he should announce a smaller program though the aegis of the executive branch.  The GOP will attack the President anyway and call the measure a failure, but some people will get some help.

Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post is all about Option One here.

Obama and his advisers know very well that this is the wrong time to cut government spending. They know that using federal money to seed big new initiatives — to upgrade the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, jump-start the “clean” energy industry, retrain the unemployed so they can compete in tomorrow’s job market — would give the economy a much-needed boost. They know, too, that federal action to buoy the housing market would help revive consumer spending, thus giving corporations a reason to invest the estimated $1 trillion they’re sitting on.

Such ambitious proposals would demonstrate that the president is willing to think big — that he is not willing to accept the Republican narrative of massive retrenchment and, by implication, inevitable decline.

So Obama should go big, not small, with his jobs plan. It is hard to overstate how apprehensive most Americans are about the future. Boldness from the president may or may not get the nation’s mojo working again. Timidity surely won’t.

On one hand, Robinson has a real point.  Pushing the Overton Window to the left is long, long overdue. Reframing the argument as President Obama's decisive, strong plan to create American jobs through a major public works initiative would help combat the conservative rhetoric that all government jobs are theft bordering on immorality.   It would also draw a huge, stark contrast between the Democrats and Republicans heading into 2012.  But Republicans would kill the measure instantly, and therein lies the problem.

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives would immediately declare any such ambitious program dead on arrival. The president should welcome their opposition — and campaign vigorously against it. He can offer voters a choice between a pinched, miserly vision of the country’s prospects on the one hand and an optimistic, expansive view on the other. He needs to demand what’s right, not what the other side is willing to give.

We know Obama can be rational, realistic and eminently reasonable. Right now, he needs to be anything but. 

And here's where I disagree with Robinson.  A plan doomed from the beginning will help with the battle of rhetoric, but it will not help the tens of millions out of work right now put food on the table.  Like it or not, the President's job is to steward the country, not tilt at windmills.  In a perfect world, President Obama dropping a new Public Works Administration proposal would be the right thing to do.  But if the plan is destined to fail immediately, and for the President to spend political capital defending it, how does that help people who are out of work now and need help now in order to help their families?

But couldn't the President do both, then?  Immediately enact executive branch measures through the departments of Labor and Commerce to help the country and push for a new PWA?  That I think would be much more effective in the short and long term.  A combination of both approaches is what is needed, because if there's anything Robinson and I agree on, it's that any jobs proposal taken before Congress will be blocked by the Republicans, period, end of line.

In that respect, anything that President Obama does propose to put forth in front of Capitol Hill must be a doozy, Robinson is right on that.

We'll see what happens.