Harold Meyerson

The Democrats have shifted their focus, they tell us relentlessly, to jobs, jobs, jobs.

Would that they had.

In fact, the job proposals coming from the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are far too small to seriously reduce the massive unemployment created when the financial and housing bubbles popped. Many Democratic leaders know that, and some want to do more.

The current proposals, I was told this past weekend by George Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and probably Speaker Nancy Pelosi's most trusted counselor, "are not adequate to the scope of the problem. You still have a big gap between the resources we're offering and where we need to be. Clearly, more has to be done."

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The State of the Union looms and, with it, a shift in Barack Obama's agenda. Last year, the new president proposed big solutions to big problems. This year, as many of those solutions languish, he's come up with some proposals reminiscent of the cosmetics of Clintonism.

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“A president with an activist agenda met a Senate all but incapable of action. The mix of big government and no government proved toxic for the Democrats.” It's there in "Hamlet," in Shakespeare's most famous soliloquy. Item, under reasons "not to be": "the law's delay." Shakespeare meant court proceedings, but there are times in a nation's life when this could just as well refer to lawmaking. To take forever to pass one law -- to take the entire first year of Barack Obama's presidency -- might be permissible if all else were well, or if other needed legislation were not held up until that one law, the reform of American health care, were enacted.

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The filibuster is an affront to the most basic principles of democracy, and California's senators should take the lead in getting rid of the tactic.

It's been a maddening year for California liberals. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama carried the state by a stunning 24 points. He took office with a distinctly progressive agenda and with heavy Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. A moment of liberal breakthrough -- another 1935 or 1965 -- seemed at hand. And then . . . nothing happened.

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One of the few things we can be sure of when Congress finally enacts health-care reform is that the battle will rage on, unabated. Republicans will attack the law's weaknesses (and strengths), while Democrats will point to provisions that are popular and take effect immediately, such as the ban on insurers denying coverage for preexisting conditions.

But there are some provisions in the pending legislation that, if included in the final bill, may well drape Democratic candidates with "Kick Me" signs come November. One of these is the excise tax on more costly health insurance policies, a feature of the Senate bill that President Obama supports but that is opposed by organized labor and most House Democrats. Another is the fine to be paid by individuals who decline any coverage -- it's a relatively small amount (the Senate bill sets it at $95 for the first year) but an issue that could loom large in the political wars to come.

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Every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- has raised the hope that he would bring with him a new era of progressive reform. The legislative torrents of the New Deal and the Great Society -- a few brief years in the 1930s and the '60s that fundamentally reshaped the nation's economy and society -- are the templates that fire the liberal imagination.

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