3 September, 2011
This coming Thursday evening, President Barack Obama will unveil his administration's long awaited Job Creation Proposal. At this point little is known about its contents but many political analysts, from both the left and the right, have already filled the airways with ideas, proposals, recommendations, and solutions that they think should and should not be in it.
I believe that what most ordinary Americans want is a clear path forward to job creation. People want the circus that is the current congress to end, and have politicians focus on the country as a whole and not just the narrow interests they appear to represent. The 12% favorability rating that congress shamefully holds at the moment should be an indicator that the American people want results, not posturing, intransigence, and empty rhetoric.
The President's falling poll numbers should also be an indicator that he may need to step past an ideologically-frozen Republican Party and utilize a different strategy to break their expected impasse on his jobs initiative. Ever since Barack Obama became president republican politicians have used every slimy trick in the book to derail, slow-down, defeat, challenge, water-down, obstruct, and otherwise kill proposals set forth by this administration. And yet in the face of this the President has continued to search for bipartisanship from a GOP where the word "NO" has become their three year response to everything.
So I am hopeful that Thursday night’s speech will define a course to quickly put people back to work. I am hopeful that both houses of Congress will put aside the narrow interests of a few people and see the suffering of the millions of people without jobs. I am hopeful that the president will get cooperation for his ideas, but if not, that he will firmly and aggressively move forward with plans to put Americans back to work.
jt
