The jobs bill Congress must ‘pass now’ won’t be ready for… at least a month

While Democrats complain about uncompromising Republicans delaying progress, the reality behind President Obama's long-missing jobs plan is a delay of the White House's own making. The LA Times' Andrew Malcolm explains how the president is doing nothing more than dragging his feet when it comes to offering a concrete jobs proposal.

After 2 1/2 years, the President promised a jobs proposal speech in early August.  Then in September, he promised that after he returned from  vacation on Martha's Vineyard, he'd have a jobs plan.  Instead, we got another speech in which he suggested that since the first $787 billion of stimulus hadn't really worked, he'd need another $447 billion stimulus package to make a dent in the country's stagnate unemployment.

Are you following the logic behind all of this?

If Republicans didn't bite, no one would know Obama's Plan B was never going to work anyway. And he could try to blame the GOP next year for failing schools and rusting bridges. This also seems to make sense within Washington these days.

The president was in such a hurry to get this new spending going, everyone remembers, that during that address he said the phrase "right now" seven times. He didn't actually mean right now that night because the NFL season was opening a few minutes after his remarks.But Obama did want to show how really urgent he said the situation was, even though it had taken him 961 days as president to say them. And even though from Day #1 of the brief Obama Era polls had shown jobs and the economy were the No. 1 priority among voters but he pursued healthcare and financial reforms first. And even though unemployment had been at or above 9% for 26 of the last 28 months.

So, given the president's professed urgency, the next day, Sept. 9, everyone asked where was his jobs legislation?

And, well, it seems the urgent jobs bill hadn't actually been written yet but should be ready in a week or two. When the laughter died, the White House said on second thought the legislation would be ready for a photo op the next Monday.

Well, here we are on the next Monday after that next Monday and we've just learned from the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, that actually it seems that body won't really be seriously getting into the legislation for a while yet. The Senate has some other more important business to handle. And then there's this month's congressional vacation, which in Washington is called "a recess," like elementary school.

Man those obstructionist Republicans are just so infuriating, aren't they?