Now that the partisan controversy over the date of the president’s much-anticipated speech on the jobs crisis has ended, we return to the question of what the speech itself will contain.
The question everyone on the left is asking: Will Obama go big enough on his jobs plan?
Probably not. Most indicators suggest that we’ll see Democrats offer a set of micro-stimulating jobs measures designed to be so “reasonable” as to make Republicans look unreasonable in 2012.
And we’ll continue to see Republicans distract by characterizing taxes and environmental, health, and safety regulations as “job killers” (never mind the collapse of the financial sector, the bursting of the housing construction bubble, and the wholesale export of the manufacturing sector) and then using the jobs crisis as a cover to deplete public wealth and remove protections for public well-being.
What it all amounts to is a cloud of amoral rhetorical calculation, a political static that paralyzes and enervates: a successful low-frequency shaming of government-backed jobs creation.
The shaming of work and the hunger for honest work—if the great Catholic progressive Dorothy Day were alive today, she would have called it what it is: a moral and spiritual issue.
More than seventy years ago, my relatives followed WPA projects throughout the rural west. My grandfather and great-uncles on both sides of the family helped build the Hoover Dam, just as millions of unemployed Americans built bridges, highways, libraries, and public facilities that stand to this day. Where’s the shame in the Hoover Dam?
Of course, no one expects anything as big as the Hoover Dam to emerge from next week’s speech by President Obama. And everyone agrees that New Deal-style jobs creation is no longer feasible. But certainly religious progressives could mount a more vigorous argument for the moral value of the opportunity to work in the sectors—human services, green energy, infrastructure—that must be developed if we hope to have a legacy to leave our children.
During the debt ceiling debate, religious progressives focused on the nation’s obligations to protect the most vulnerable. It was an honorable tactic, but one that had very little traction, as Sarah Posner observed. And I argued here that that perhaps the time had come for a general retooling of religious progressive rhetoric to confront anti-state statism and call on Americans’ sense of responsibility to future generations.
The jobs crisis debate is another opportunity to put religious and spiritual values like dignity, responsibility, and industry to work against shame-inducing political static. It’s time to go big on jobs. And if the president can’t or won’t, religious progressives should.
