President Obama chose a Northern Virginia construction site on Wednesday to personalize the stakes of the stimulus plan, saying its passage would give back jobs to laid-off Caterpillar workers.
The company “has announced some 20,000 layoffs in the last few weeks,” Obama said, adding that Chairman and CEO Jim Owens “said that if the [stimulus] passes, his company would be able to rehire some of those employees.”
Obama plans to travel on Thursday to a Caterpillar manufacturing plant in East Peoria, Ill., as part of his tour touting the $789 billion package — which includes funding for school and road construction.
But as Obama travels the country putting human faces on the plan, some policy watchers say he needs to tread carefully.
“There’s a danger in going to far in personalizing the policy disputes,” said Andres Martinez, a public policy expert at the D.C.-based New America Foundation. It “reflects Obama’s disappointment that we’re apparently not in the new bipartisan era that he wanted to be in.”
The effort could backfire politically, Martinez said, much as it did when the president “pilloried banker salaries and then seemed surprised that the treasury secretary had a hard time trying to sell a plan that would invest a lot more taxpayer money into the banking system.”
Virginia Gov. and Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Tim Kaine appeared with the president at the site, a dusty mile-long stretch of the Fairfax County Parkway in Springfield, awaiting funds for completion.
Owning up to both of his titles, Kaine plugged the need for infrastructure locally as well as urging the U.S. Congress to act swiftly.
“If we can use construction to stimulate the economy in the short term,” Kaine said, “we can use that platform to stimulate [other sectors of the economy] in the long term.”
According to Obama, the plan would “create or save almost 100,000 jobs” in Virginia, give tax cuts to 3 million workers and extend unemployment benefits by $100 per month.
Pat Herrity, who represents the Springfield District on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, said the county needs the package in order to get to work on its “dearth of shovel-ready projects,” but he expressed concern with how well the plan would work for Fairfax overall.
“Our economy is driven by technology companies, government contractors and nonprofits,” Herrity said. “Public infrastructure doesn’t go too far in stimulating those sectors.”
