Does the GOP have an answer to the American Jobs Act?

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Now that we know the contours of the president’s jobs plan, here’s a thought experiment:

You’re a Republican, who for three years has made opposition to anything Barack Obama proposes — even if he proposes things that were once Republican ideas — the bedrock of your politics.

The strategy has worked pretty well for you. Obama’s poll numbers have dropped. The public views him as unable to produce on the economy. And the gridlock in Washington has diminished all of Washington, the president (and you) included. But no matter that Obama is polling in the low 40s and your party is below 10 percent in most polls. All that matters is that the public mood be sour enough next November to get a Republican into the White house.

For more than a year, you’ve also convinced much of Washington, including the Beltway media, that deficits and debt were all that mattered. There hasn’t been a real national conversation about jobs since 2009, when after the stimulus passed, Capitol Hill’s as Washington batted back and forth the various plans and arguments over how to reduce the deficit.

WATCH ‘HARDBALL’ COVERAGE OF OBAMA’S JOBS BILL CAMPAIGNING:
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But now, jobs are all that matter, and a restless populace isn’t going to have much patience with your party’s tried and true, wall to wall obstruction of all things Obama; at least, not on something called the “American Jobs Act.”

So what do you do? How do you counter a proposal that contains some $200 billion in tax cuts, including popular tax breaks for small businesses and for hiring the unemployed, plus an extension of the payroll tax cut that, if you obstruct it, will result in a tax hike?

How do you oppose infrastructure spending in your own district, including money to rebuild crumbling schools, roads and bridges? After all, because of the tea party’s near religious zeal against spending, you’ve already spent a year failing at every Congressman’s prime directive: bringing money home to the locals. And now that you’ve taken a self imposed vow against earmarks, a jobs bill may be your only way to get that money home.

So far, Republicans haven’t come up with much of a response to the jobs plan. Their stock answers: the stimulus failed (except the CBO said it succeeded), more tax cuts and deregulation (because unsafe food and free range mining creates medical jobs?) … None of it is new. None of it sounds like job creation, and too much of it sounds like a firewall to protect the rich — the very people the American public wants to see pay their fair share (a phrase repeated multiple times in the president’s speech before Congress last week) — through higher taxes.

And don’t even think about proposing de-funding PBS again. Seriously.

So Republicans are in a bind. Which may be why their chief wonk, Rep Paul Ryan, was down to complaining about “Keynsian economics” — something 99 percent of Americans either don’t know the meaning of, or think very little about, because they’re not economists.

Most Americans are regular, fed up folks, and many are wondering if Washington is capable of doing anything in their interests, rather than the interests of big business and the very wealthy.

And whether or not they’re particularly high on Barack Obama, an American Jobs Act is probably going to sound pretty good to most of them right now.