Washington Post : Eugener Robinson : A Big Bold Obama Jobs Program ?? : 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

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Washington Post -
On Jobs, Time to Be Bold -
By Eugene Robinson -
August 30, 2011


On Jobs, Time to Be Bold


Some excerpts :

WASHINGTON -- President Obama's promised jobs plan needs to be unrealistic and unreasonable, at the very least. If he can crank it all the way up to unimaginable, that would be even better.

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And why does the furrowed-brow crowd insist on limiting the sample to presidents of the post-World War II era? Perhaps because Franklin Delano Roosevelt totally messes up the story line. FDR was re-elected in 1936 when unemployment was roughly 17 percent. Voters understood they were living through a global economic crisis that wouldn't be solved overnight.

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Obama can probably win this way, but he wouldn't enter his second term with much of a mandate. That's why the FDR example is relevant: Roosevelt won re-election in the midst of the Great Depression not by convincing voters that his opponents would make the economic situation worse but by demonstrating his utter determination to return the nation to prosperity, no matter what obstacles he had to overcome.

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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.

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

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