Eugene Robinson joins the chorus:
President Obama’s promised jobs plan needs to be unrealistic and unreasonable, at the very least. If he can crank it all the way up to unimaginable, that would be even better.... The unemployment crisis is so deep and self-perpetuating that only a big, surprising, over-the-top jobs initiative could have real impact....
He needs to demand what’s right, not what the other side is willing to give.
Which in this instance would be supremely pragmatic.
In Obama's first two years his pragmatism dictated the realistic, the reasonable, the imaginable, the rather modest and unsurprising; his judicious balancing acts meant safe and successful arrivals on the other, legislative side. The discretion that marked his pragmatism and defined his victories put him on the road to presidential greatness.
Yet now an infantile House and filibuster-happy Senate have liberated Obama, even if liberation is not what he sought. The caution that once aided his presidency's progress is now a crippling agent of perceived befuddlement and trepidation -- reversible only through pronounced determination and boldness.
It makes little difference that the public's perception might be inaccurate. The pragmatic question is, Is it real? And the inescapable answer is in the affirmative.
Robinson concludes:
We know Obama can be rational, realistic and eminently reasonable. Right now, he needs to be anything but.
I'd quibble with those lines only in the sense that, pragmatically speaking, "right now" Obama must translate the rational, realistic and reasonable into the transcendently audacious, which itself is not necessarily irrational, unrealistic or unreasonable. On occasion, the most audacious maneuver is also the only practical one (short of surrender). This happens to be one of those occasions.
Sure, in playing it more conservatively Obama could still, odds are, eke by in 2012, especially given the opposition's seeming determination to run on a platform of near psychotic indifference to the nation's suffering. FDR faced a similar political choice in 1935. Although he wasn't burdened by Obama's Congress, he was hardly free of scathing critics and fierce opposition. Roosevelt's answer to them -- Roosevelt's choice -- was the Second New Deal, a legislative package (including Social Security) bigger than bolder than any before. He opted for presidential greatness.