Jon Alter chimes in on the constituency question …
The fate of the stimulus does not turn on which constituenices will support it but on Obama’s leadership skills. An interesting historical analogy might be the creation in 1933 of the Civilian Conservation Corps, to which I devote a chapter in “The Defining Moment.”
Shortly after being sworn-in, FDR said he wanted to do something fast about unemployment. He told his aides that he wanted 250,000 unemployed young men–many of them hobos–working by summer, then only three months away. Labor was adamently opposed. The head of the AFL testified that it “smacked of Fascism, Hitlerism and Sovietism.” (His real problem was that the wages were only $1 a day). The mayors had no interest because these were rural jobs. None of his Cabinet thought it could be done in so short a time. But Roosevelt and his Rahm Emanuel, a wonderful character named Louis Howe, were determined that this happen. They used their political capital to get it through Congress and their bureaucratic smarts to get it off the ground. It became the model of all New Deal programs, the inspiration for all non-military national service and the fastest mobilization in American history. Eventually three million men were employed and they planted three billion trees, saving the topography of the U.S. The men who came up through the CCC, like Gen. George Marshall, went on to win World War II. The camps were racially integrated, which presaged the integration of the armed forces and of American society generally.
My point is that you don’t have to have all the constituencies lined up to set great change in motion. Coincidentally, 250,000 jobs is the exact number Obama has proposed for national service. We know that “green collar” jobs will be in the stimulus. But we don’t know yet whether national service jobs will be included.
