Obama’s Priority: Bold Jobs Program

05 August 2011 |permalink | email article

A compelling perception about Barack Obama’s role in the bitter partisan debate over raising the debt ceiling limit is he failed to present himself as a leader and consensus builder – compromising too much with a Tea Party-tainted Republican House, obsessed with reducing spending without new taxes.

The president may be an egghead but he’s not a wimp. He succeeded to do what an inept President Bush failed to accomplish: erase Osama bin Laden.

“Getting Bin Laden,” a several thousand word piece in The New Yorker (Aug. 8) documenting the final solution, with zero margin for error, is a rare piece of journalism. One month before the 2008 Presidential election, Obama, then a senator from Illinois, and in a debate with John McCain in Nashville, was asked by a woman in the audience about pursuing Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

Osama replied, “If we have Obama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistan government is unable, or unwilling to take them out, then I think we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national-security priority.”

Obama was at first unimpressed with CIA efforts to track bin Laden, but in August, 2010 he got better news and ordered Leon Panetta to begin exploring options for a military strike on a large concrete compound in remote Abbotabad, inside Pakistan.

Afterwards, Obama said, “Our intelligence professionals did some amazing work. I had fifty-fifty confidence that bin Laden was there, but I had one-hundred–per-cent confidence in you guys. You are, literally, the finest small-fighting force in the world.”

Switch reels: Obama’s major re-election priority now is creating millions of new jobs to lift the economy. He must emulate the New Deal model FDR created in 1933 that put over 4 million unemployed back to work by creating agencies like the Civil Works Administration.

FDR’s stimulus model worked. But in 1937, he caved in to Republican opposition, dramatically scaling back stimulus and major infrastructure programs. Obama faces a worse problem today as Republicans demand further program cuts and blame government. A bold jobs solution is urgent – a New New Deal. Obama must lead and sell it to a willing country now.   


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