by Jules Witcover

As members of Congress were busying themselves back home seeking reelection, President Obama took to the Rose Garden the other day to urge them again to back an initiative that, with greater urgency and better timing, might have helped his own slumping political fortunes.

He dusted off his proposal of a month ago, introduced then with only middling fanfare while Congress was still in session, for major infrastructure repair of the nation's bridges, railroads, highways and airports. Beyond the obvious domestic need, the plan offered a boon to millions of jobless construction workers across the country.

The president put a price tag of $50 billion on it, to be paid by dropping some tax breaks to gas and oil corporations who rightly should bear a greater burden of maintaining the transportation system on which they thrive. As designed by the administration, the program was not to increase the federal deficit, which now is of such concern to the Republican Party that first grew it out of the budget surplus left by Bill Clinton.

Obama was trying to breathe life into an idea that had been crying out for implementation throughout the Great Recession, and particularly as the national unemployment rate rose to 9.6 percent and has plateaued there.

The president took note of it, observing that "nearly one in five construction workers is still unemployed and needs a job. And that makes no sense," he said, stating the obvious, "when so much of America needs rebuilding."

He subtly implied the opposition party was to blame, saying: "Investing in infrastructure is something members of both political parties have always supported. There's no reason why we can't do this. This is work that needs to be done. There are workers who can do it. All we need is the political will."

Obama got a well-orchestrated boost for this renewed pitch from his Treasury Department, his Council of Economic Advisers and a bipartisan group of governors and mayors. They argued that now is precisely the time to kick off a much expanded public-works initiative, with construction costs low and construction labor abundant.

All this raises the question of why the Obama administration didn't trot out this initiative much earlier and with much greater publicity and urgency than it did. On the surface at least, it is much more defensible and much less vulnerable to partisan sniping than, for instance, Obama's health-care reform package that weathered such an ideological storm from conservatives last year.

One reason may be that this administration, like the Clinton administration to some extent before it, remains spooked by the specter of being linked to the New Deal, which has been thoroughly demonized by Republicans in general and conservatives in particular over the last half century.

Rebuilding America was a centerpiece of Franklin D. Roosevelt's early presidency, marked by great public-works projects across the country, both urban and rural, as well as by the gradual unionization of the American workforce.

The New Deal became a major engine not only of recovery from the Great Depression, but also of the creation of a greatly expanded middle class. In gratitude and/or political self-interest, it embraced the Democratic Party for years ahead, through Harry Truman's Fair Deal, John Kennedy's New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

Eventually, however, perceived excesses of the New Deal as movement and symbol nurtured the emergence of the conservativism of Ronald Reagan, and of GOP congressional leadership personified by Newt Gingrich and now John Boehner.

The reluctance of latter Democratic presidents, from Jimmy Carter to Clinton and now Obama, to more aggressively use federal power and machinery to put millions of Americans to work appears to stem at least in part from fear of reawakening the bugaboo of the New Deal.

The tardy pushing of public works to repair the nation's infrastructure isn't likely to help the Democrats in next month's congressional elections. But if more Republicans are elected, or even if they take control on Capitol Hill, this effort could be one of the more promising Obama initiatives in the hostile political climate that is expected next year.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Feminine Mystique

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

 

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