For President Obama, not all temporary jobs are created equal.
Short-term jobs tied to the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline are of limited appeal, Obama emphasized both before and after he vetoed legislation authorizing the start of the Canada-to-Texas project.
However, the president took an opposite view in pushing an $800 billion stimulus plan in his first term, calling those jobs “shovel ready” rather than temporary.
What has changed?
The White House insists that Obama isn’t being hypocritical, saying the stimulus was a national effort to bring the country back from the recession, as opposed to an individual project.
“That’s a flawed comparison,” a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner of equating Obama’s stimulus rhetoric to that on Keystone XL. “This is one project. Republicans act like the fate of the economy is dependent on it. Can you imagine if our jobs plan when the president took office was one pipeline?”
Republicans counter that such criticism is disingenuous, saying Obama should welcome any jobs, even if small in scale.
“It’s been striking how little Keystone jobs matter to a president who has bent over backwards to highlight things that created far fewer jobs,” said a House GOP leadership aide. “The president makes it sound like we can either build Keystone or repair the nation’s roads and bridges. Why not do both?”
The project’s backers have championed the 42,100 direct and indirect jobs that the State Department said the pipeline would create during its two-year construction phase.
Obama this week claimed that he used his veto powers for just the third time because Republicans were interfering with an ongoing State Department analysis of the pipeline, at more than six years, the longest such review on record.
But in defending his move, Obama sought to cast doubt on the economic benefits of the project, too.
“Unfortunately, the Keystone pipeline has been hyped a lot by the oil industry, but the fact of the matter is this is Canadian oil being shipped through the United States — and [it] creates approximately 250, 300 permanent jobs,” Obama told Kansas City affiliate KMBC on Thursday.
“We could be creating millions of jobs all across the country if we were building American infrastructure, including for American energy producers,” he added.
Yet, Obama routinely has highlighted individual infrastructure projects — and the temporary construction jobs that come with them — as part of his broader economic argument.
“Of all the industries hammered by the economic downturn, construction has been among the hardest hit,” Obama said in November 2011, speaking of the need for repairs to the Key Bridge, which connects the nation’s capital to Virginia. “Since the housing bubble burst, millions of construction workers have had to look for a job. So today, I’m joining many of these workers to say that it makes absolutely no sense when there’s so much work to be done that they’re not doing the work.”
That logic, however, does not apply to Keystone XL, especially since Republicans won control of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections, putting the pipeline on the fast track.
“There are a lot more direct ways to create well-paying Americans construction jobs,” Obama said at a year-end news conference in December.
“I’ve just tried to give this perspective, because I think that there’s been this tendency to really hype this thing as some magic formula to what ails the U.S. economy,” he added.
The president also took a shot at Keystone XL in his most prominent speech of the year.
“Twenty-first century businesses need 21st century infrastructure — modern ports, stronger bridges, faster trains and the fastest Internet. Democrats and Republicans used to agree on this,” Obama said in his State of the Union address in January. “So let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline.”
Critics say that Obama is refusing to budge on Keystone XL because environmentalists so fervently oppose it. To date, Obama has seemed more sympathetic to their argument than the one being espoused by labor unions welcoming the tens of thousands of temporary jobs.
Obama’s veto of Keystone XL is problematic for the White House in one sense: Moderate Democrats want to approve the project.
At least seven Democrats in recent days have said they would vote to override the president’s veto. Still, Republicans don’t have the 67 votes in the Senate they would need to reverse the veto.
At least for now, Obama sees little benefit in appeasing conservatives on the issue. That could change, however, if Obama needs a bargaining chip in budget negotiations later this year.
Regardless, Republicans say they will continue to focus on what they see as Obama’s hypocrisy on the issue.
“Jobs are jobs,” said the House GOP leadership aide. “If it’s such a small project and so insignificant, then the president should have no problem getting out of the way.”
