Apparently, the Obama folks are prepared to play hardball on the jobs bill, or at least that’s what they are saying now. For the moment, it means they’re not bargaining with themselves, though that’s not to say that there’s no compromise built into the bill. Like so much of what Obama has proposed, it assumes he can get half a loaf, so that’s all he asks for. This time, though, they are signaling that they aren’t willing to slice any more.
My own opinion is that they have no expectation that the bill, or any bill, so conceived and so dedicated, will pass. It was proposed for rhetorical purposes only. It is, after all, election season. But if they actually do expect to pass something without giving up the store, one must ask how they expect that to happen. It will take the Republicans months to accept the fact that Obama is unwilling to cave. In the case of people, after all, past performance is a guarantee of future performance. Put that fact together with the further fact that Republicans believe a collapsed economy represents their ticket to power, and the outlook for the bill looks dismal. I continue to believe that he’ll drop the bill, win or lose, sometime after the first Tuesday of November, 2012.
And if, by chance, Obama does manage to pass the bill against all the odds, weak tea as it is, we must ask ourselves: what could the man have accomplished if he’d faced reality at the beginning of his term, when he had large majorities in both houses and the avid support of a substantial number of ordinary people. Did he condemn us to years of recession just to get Olympia Snowe and/or Susan Collins to vote with him?
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