What Do Progressives Want From Obama’s Jobs Plan?

The fact that President Obama is requesting a joint session of congress to hear his jobs speech certainly reflects an effort to raise the political stakes around it, despite the considerable evidence that presidential speeches don’t move the needle on politics. Still, let’s assume for the sake of argument that a presidential speech can be a big deal. What do progressives want to hear? Paul Krugman, for example, says “let’s see what the jobs plan looks like — and more important, since the GOP will block everything, how (and if) he makes a political issue of that obstruction.”

As I said yesterday, the problem here is that the kind of robust jobs plan Krugman or I would like to see is probably quite different from the kind of jobs plan that makes for optimal politics. If you’re talking about a purely political speech then dwelling on the fact that negative real interest rates are crazy or how the Federal Reserve should be more tolerant of higher prices and especially higher prices for food and gasoline is a bad strategy. The public doesn’t have a deep understanding of the deficit or passionate views about it, but they know that they’re “bad.” The public has less understanding of monetary policy, but they know that inflation is “bad.” You can revive the economy with higher deficits and more tolerance for inflation, but you don’t inspire the public with it. If the speech is just about politics, you have to judge it purely as political messaging and not for agreement with wonky accounts of the truth.

Meanwhile, I do think the bottom line remains that speeches are a big deal to political reporters but not a big deal to politics. Low information swing voters are, almost by definition, not the audience for prime time presidential speeches or post-speech blog posts.