A Major Impact

Since his jobs speech, president Obama has been out promoting the passage of the American Jobs Act. By now, most of the country must be aware of the program and the big push that Obama is putting behind it. As a result, I thought it would be instructive to see how this move has affected Obama's approval ratings. On the day before the speech, Obama's ratings were 43% approve and 56% disapprove according to Rasmussen. Today, those ratings are now 42% approve and 55% disapprove. In other words, there is no difference.

It is interesting to me to see the yawn with which most folks greeted the president's push for this bill. There has been no organized Republican opposition to Obama on the bill. To the contrary, both the Speaker of the House and the Senate Republican leader said that they would like to work with the president to find common ground to help grow the economy. Few in the media have even pointed out that there is as of yet no bill to pass despite all of Obama's speeches; the actual bill is supposed to be unveiled in the coming week. No, the yawn from the American people is the reaction of a group that has tuned out yet another speech from Mr. Teleprompter of 2008. The folks are looking for accomplishments, not words. They want jobs, not promises. And those are impossibly high hurdles for someone like Obama who talks the talk but never, never walks the walk.

It seems that until things actually get better for the country, they will not get better for Obama. That will be a major problem in his re-election. Think of it this way: the biggest item in the new program is the payroll tax cut for employers and employees. About half of that cut is already in place; the Obama plan is just to keep that half in place for another year. That means that the impact of this cut is going to be much less than were the whole thing new. Another big item in the program is infrastructure spending. This will take years to get done. There is still a major chunk of the stimulus spending approved in 2009 that remains unspent. A new program will not progress any faster. A third big part of the Obama program is sending funds to the states to "rehire" teachers. If that kicks in at all, it will not be until September of 2012, since the school year and its programs are already fixed at districts all across the country. The last two big parts of the Obama plan are extending unemployment benefits for those who are already getting them and continuing the right for small businesses to expense investments. These are like the payroll tax cut extension. They are already in place. They may prevent future losses of jobs, but they will not create many new ones.

If Americans continue to demand results rather than just accepting words, 2012 is going to be a long year indeed for Barack Obama.