| In addition to Devilstower's great piece on six things the President and members of Congress should do around the jobs summit, let me add two more:
7. Don't take credit until after it's done. When my boyfriend and I were driving up to Syracuse for Chris and Natasha's wedding this past summer, somewhere on I-81 in central Pennsylvania, here's the first of these I would see:
Go Obama/Democrats/Keynesian economics, we both cheered!
90 minutes later had barely moved 10 miles because the construction traffic sucked so much, were late for the event, and were both muttering how much we hated the stimulus package. Lesson: finish the project, then take credit.
8. Don't forget the small projects. For all the talk of infrastructure highways and national parks- which both could put a lot of people to work and generate a lot of public goodwill by the sheer number of users- let's not forget the smaller projects. Here's a gorgeous new dog park in my neighborhood:
And there's a big "project funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" sign on the other side of it. While it may not have put as many people to work to build it, in terms of the politics of demonstrating how the stimulus has built stuff and taking credit, sometimes the dog park visited multiple times per week by the same residents beats all the folks driving once up I-81 through Pennsylvania and forgetting who/what build it. |
