A trick for campaign?

Demonstrators from the Backbone Campaign, part of the Stop the Machine
occupation of Freedom Plaza, unfurl banners Tuesday in front of the Capitol.
(Karen Bleier / AFP/Getty Images) - LA Times

On Tuesday this week, Republicans in the US Senate blocked President Obama’s jobs bill despite his campaigning efforts across the country. According to the BBC, Democrats said that Republicans are more interested in defeating Obama than helping the country recover from its deepest recession since the 1930s.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Not until the Tuesday vote could experts have predicted its result. The Los Angeles Times has posted experts’ critiques of the President’s jobs bill. On its editorial pages, it states that “the president is right to call for his plan to be paid for, and right to suggest that it be done over time. But his speech offered no new thoughts on how to do so; instead, Obama simply repeated his call for modest reforms in entitlements and more taxes on the wealthy”. Danny Schechter from Al Jazeera states that Obama's timing and political environment couldn't be worse. Republicans were attacking his plan before he even outlined it. His efforts to get conservatives on board seem to be a non-starter. Fareed Zakaria of CNN argues that the President’s proposals are temporary and short-term. What the country really needs, he believes, is to start transitioning to a longer-range plan of investments for the next generation of growth in America. This will not work if the jobs bill is carried.

The 2012 electoral campaign is coming and it seems the President has taken a ‘campaign-style’ tour promoting the jobs bill as a ‘rehearsal’ for the main campaign next year. Unfortunately, it failed. The atmosphere of policy debate has now also appeared in the recent leaderless movement ‘Occupy Wall Street’. While Obama and the Democrats have expressed their support, other conservative politicians condemned the protestors as the ‘anti-American mobs’. Jobs, justice, and reforms would now probably be high on the agenda for the electoral campaign next year. And, as Michael Hiltzik writes on the Los Angeles Times website, moving from protest to policy is the hardest leap that grass-roots organizations face, akin to turning a promising patent into a billion-dollar business. It, after all, depends on politicians.

President Obama made a toast "to more jobs" with unemployed tradesmen
in Florida - BBC News

It may be that the President is pretending to support those who are now getting angry over the gap between the rich and the poor and injustice, in order to attract their votes. This, nevertheless, might also be a double-edged sword if his proposals continuously fail.