by Jules Witcover

President Obama's notion of tackling the high unemployment rate by diverting to Main Street some of the unused federal stimulus money designated for Wall Street has Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gnashing his teeth.

"Using bailout funds for another spending spree would violate both current law and our pledge to return every dollar to the taxpayers," McConnell complained in response to Obama's latest plans to put some of the nation's jobless back to work through more government spending and tax cuts to job-creating small businesses.

"Americans' patience is running awfully thin with politicians who promise jobs but deliver only more debts," the unsmiling GOP prophet of gloom and doom observed.

Combatting high unemployment in times of recession is a complicated task. But there is certain simple justice in taking Uncle Sam's dollars originally slated to bail out banks that helped dig the economic hole and giving it to the consequently idled working stiffs of the country.

With rescued Wall Street firms rapidly playing back the federal loans they received in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), it seems a no-brainer economically as well as politically to spread some of the loosened-up cash among the Main Street victims of Wall Street's excessive pursuit of greed.

According to administration projections, because of the fast paybacks of the government loans by recipient banks of the $787 billion approved by Congress for economic stimulus, the TARP will cost $200 billion less than expected. Therefore, it's calculated, both job creation and some deficit reduction can be tackled.

Up to now the Obama stimulus package has been, ironically, mostly carved out of the traditional Republican playbook -- helping the big guys in the hope and expectation that benefits for the little guys will trickle down. What recovery has been achieved, though, has been largely a jobless one with insufficient trickle-down.

In proposing now to provide tax breaks for small business, which the Republicans never cease saying creates the most jobs in the country, the Democratic president in a sense is calling their bluff. Since that's what they always say they want, he is telling the opposition party he's willing to do it their way, so they have no reason not to support this new initiative.

Instead, from early indications from McConnell and Co., they prefer to continue focusing on deficit reduction, calling for any TARP savings to cut the debt -- most of which was on the White House doorstep when Obama arrived.

This wailing about the size of the national debt, mind you, comes from the folks who largely accumulated it over the previous eight years by first running through the surplus Bill Clinton left at that same doorstep in 2001, and then declining to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while lavishing tax cuts on the nation's wealthy, who didn't need them.

While adopting a policy of stonewalling against Obama's initiatives and saying a resounding "No" to his overtures toward bipartisanship on health-care reform, the opposition party contents itself with crying foul every time he mentions where the deficit came from.

Every passing reference by Obama to the debt he inherited from the Bush years is treated by its creators as a punch below the belt. The Republican leadership in Congress has been all too willing to recall Obama's politically naive instruction to his own party to look forward, not back, in addressing the challenges of its newfound leadership.

Whether the subject is how the country in pre-Obama days accumulated its huge deficit by not paying its bills, or how Bush's radical unilateral foreign policy hugely compounded that deficit, the opposition party strikes the pose of an innocent bystander at the curb, deploring a car wreck.

Such is the circumstance in which the new president approaches the end of his first year in the Oval Office, still busily trying to climb out of the hole in which he found himself from day one. Meanwhile, the folks who dug the hole stand around leaning on their shovels, watching and caviling.

Attacking the Jobless Economic Recovery | Jules Witcover