Pat Dollard

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Politico:

Senate Republicans on Wednesday seized on President Barack Obama’s admission to The New York Times that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects,” an acknowledgement they say suggests the administration’s $814 billion economic stimulus plan is a failure.

“As the trillion-dollar stimulus fails to fulfill promises, President Obama is separating himself from his own sales pitch on shovel-ready projects,” read the headline of a news release from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

And Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, noting the administration previously had stated the stimulus would create or save 3.5 million jobs, said the White House now admits “it might have spoken too soon.”

As the administration has pitched the massive stimulus program for more than a year, Vice President Joe Biden and a handful of other Democrats have repeatedly highlighted “shovel-ready” roads, bridges and airport runways that could immediately produce jobs.

Many of these projects, however, have become bogged down by strict reporting requirements and other federal red tape.

During an hour-long interview with The Times’s Peter Baker, Obama reflected on his nearly two years in office and acknowledged some “tactical” blunders.

Obama told Baker he let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat,” and realized that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects,” according to a New York Times Magazine cover story that will be published Sunday.

Three weeks before the midterm elections, the Obama administration is still trying to convince voters that the stimulus is working. And despite any setbacks, the president just this week pushed for more funding to replace aging infrastructure, which he said would not only improve safety but immediately create jobs.

“By making these investments across the country, we won’t just make our economy run better over the long haul,” Obama said, “we’ll create good, middle-class jobs right now.”

McConnell, though, said “Americans are tired of their tax dollars being spent on more government” and want instead “new solutions that actually enable the economy to recover.”

“Last year, the White House rushed a Stimulus bill through Congress promising a surge in ‘shovel-ready’ jobs that the president now says didn’t exist,” McConnell said in a statement. “They said we needed to borrow the trillion dollars it cost the taxpayers to keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent. Well, more than a year later unemployment is hovering around 10 percent.”