The White House keeps saying that President Obama is focused on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” but what is he going to do to create jobs? The only examples I’ve seen are small-bore ideas like “cash for caulkers” that are the economic equivalent of President Clinton promoting school uniforms.

In reality, the jobs push is mostly for show. Besides big pump-priming stimulus measures (which are now ruled out due to the deficit), the president’s ability to affect the economy in the short term is limited — he is largely a prisoner of circumstance. However, it’s politically important to appear to be trying to do something to (a) limit the political costs of the economic slump and (b) be able to claim credit for subsequent growth.* That’s why you’re going to see such an emphasis on jobs from the administration going forward.

* For an example of how (b) is often done in a misleading way, see this post on how Treasury Department tried to claim that the 2003 Bush tax cuts were responsible for subsequent jobs growth (while omitting the 2001-2002 period, including the 2001 tax cuts).

Update 1/15 5:33 PM: Kevin Drum makes a similar argument in objecting to a specious Charlie Cook column stating that Obama should have “pivoted back to jobs and the economy sooner”:

Is it a purely political argument that, regardless of the merits, Obama should have been viewed as spending 24/7 hunkered down in the West Wing helping create jobs for American workers? Or is it a substantive argument that governments have limited bandwidth and Obama should have spent more of his on reducing the unemployment rate?

The former is puerile and the latter is mysterious. What exactly should he have done? He passed a big stimulus bill, and it’s plain that there’s no political will in Congress to pass another one of any size. He extended unemployment benefits. He tried to take action on mortgage foreclosures, and perhaps he could have done more along those lines. But the financial lobby fought him, Congress wouldn’t support cramdown legislation, and banks have resisted taking part in his program. The Consumer Finance Protection Agency would be a nice pro-worker feather in his cap, but it wouldn’t help anyone find a job and probably wouldn’t have gotten through Congress any quicker even if they weren’t busy with healthcare.

So exactly what would his “pivot” back to jobs have looked like? Nobody ever really says. But aside from giving rousing speeches, the big levers available to fix the economy are monetary, which is in the hands of the Fed; fiscal, which he’s done; and meliorative, which he’s largely done too. The rest is mostly window dressing.