The May jobs numbers – with a net growth of 175,000 jobs – shows an economy that is treading water. There is no change in the unemployment rate or number of unemployed, no change in number of long-term unemployed.

Worse, there is no change in the employment-population ratio, which “has shown little movement” over the past year. Labor force participation rate similarly is unchanged, and slightly down for the year.

There is no sight of any relief on jobs. The jobs that are being created are primarily in business services, “food services and drinking places,” and retail trade. These tend to be low-paid, part-time jobs with few benefits. With Americans still struggling with mass unemployment, at least they will have more people serving them at “drinking places.”

Federal government employment is down, as the sequester and budget cuts take effect. We’ve lost 17,000 manufacturing jobs in the past two months, and there’s been virtually no growth in construction jobs.

This is a national emergency and a human tragedy. More than 20 million people remain in need of full-time work. A young generation is graduating into the worst jobs market since the Great Depression. It is long past time for Washington to stop treating this reality as normal and start treating it as a crisis. Austerity lite is failing here, just as austerity has failed in Europe. It is time for Congress to stop its slash and ruin policies, and start rebuilding the country and putting people back to work.

The U.S. Congress votes readily to subsidize the big banks to our peril. The Congress lavishes subsidies to Big Oil to our shame. Congress allows Big Pharma to help health care costs bankrupt us.

But Republican senators Lamar Alexander, Tom Coburn and Richard Burr say it is “playing politics” to subsidize student loans that help young people get the education they need.  We should be taxing big banks, Big Oil and Big Pharma, not subsidizing them.  But everyone agrees that young people need all the education that they earn.  Our nation’s future depends on giving the next generation the best education possible.  So why not subsidize student loans rather than banks?

No, that’s “playing politics.”  And just to be fair, they end the lower rate offered to poor students under the Stafford loan program.  Shades of Anatole France:

“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.”

Senators, you are without shame.

Democrats now delight in watching Republicans flounder as they try to free themselves from the failures of President George W. Bush and the extremes of the Tea Party. But the GOP’s tribulations should not blind Democrats to their own challenge. The party must free itself from the legacy of former President Bill Clinton and the centrism of his New Democrats.

Clinton’s successes in office have little relevance for Democrats today. The 1990s were a very different time both politically and economically. In fact, many of Clinton’s policies led to the travails now facing Americans. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution. And Clinton’s strategy of co-opting conservative themes offers no way out.

The Clinton Temptation

Democrats understandably feast on the comparison between the salad days of the Clinton presidency and the Bush debacle. Twenty-two million new jobs under Clinton; the worst jobs record since the Great Depression under Bush. The longest period of growth in U.S. history under Clinton; the weakest recovery and biggest bust under Bush. Budget surpluses under Clinton; deficits as far as the eye could see under Bush. No wonder President Barack Obama called on Clinton to make his case for re-election at the 2012 Democratic convention.

As leader of the New Democrats, Clinton tacked to the prevailing winds of that conservative time. His first presidential campaign in 1992 combined a populist economic focus on jobs – “It’s the economy, stupid” – with transparent efforts to disarm explosive Republican wedge issues. He promised to “end welfare as we know it”; embraced the death penalty and harsh “three strikes and you’re out” mandatory sentencing; and gained editorial approval by blindsiding Rev. Jesse Jackson with his “Sister Souljah” gambit.

On the economy, Clinton’s New Democrats scorned old “tax and spend” liberals. They boasted that they understood markets, were skeptical of big government and disdained the outmoded social welfare policies of the New Deal and Great Society. The promise of America, they argued, was “equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.”

After taking office, Clinton shelved most of his populist promises. He made Robert Rubin, the Goldman Sachs co-chairman, his economic czar and embraced deficit reduction as the key to wooing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to lower interest rates and fuel growth.

After Republicans took Congress in 1994, Clinton famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” He championed deregulation, particularly in telecommunications and finance, which culminated in the repeal of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall Act boundaries on banks and the torpedoing of efforts to regulate derivatives.

Clinton did reverse some of President Ronald Reagan’s top-end tax breaks, but he also lowered capital-gains taxes, and his reforms encouraged the explosion of stock options for high-level executives. He embraced House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s welfare repeal and even flirted with carving private accounts out of Social Security.

Clinton’s trade policy was defined by and for multinational corporations and banks. His major trade accords protected the rights of investors but not workers. China was accorded most-favored-nation status despite its mercantilist policies. A strong dollar favored investment abroad but hindered exports.

In today’s political environment, Clinton’s retreats and concessions on social issues are embarrassing anachronisms. The Republican social wedge issues of the 1990s – including gay rights, women’s and minority issues – are now sources of Democratic strength. State budget constraints, meanwhile, have pushed even Republican governors to turn against extreme sentencing and capital punishment policies.

Obama’s nomination and election put a stake in the New Democrat’s’ “Southern White Hope” strategy. Democrats no longer worry about being a “new coalition increasingly dominated by minority groups and white elites,” as William Galston, a former Clinton adviser, and Elaine Kamarck decried in “The Politics of Evasion,” a New Democrat manifesto. It is the GOP that now struggles to escape being a whites-only minority party.

On economic issues, Clinton’s Rubinomics contributed directly to digging the hole we are in. Deregulation helped unleash the “financial wilding” that eventually blew up the economy. The celebration of deficit reduction bolstered the illusory belief in “expansionary austerity” that has driven Europe back into recession and sabotaged any chance of getting a sufficient stimulus here at home.

Clinton’s budget surpluses were devoted to paying down the debt, even as public investments vital to a modern economy were starved. Trade policies rewarded multinationals for shipping jobs abroad, creating the imbalances in trade and financial flows that were unsustainable, while hollowing out American manufacturing and the well-paid, middle-class union jobs it traditionally provided.

The perverse corporate CEO compensation policies, top-end tax breaks and continued assault on labor unions led to what historian Godfrey Hodgson concluded was the most significant characteristic of the American economy in the 1990s – “its persistent and growing inequality.” Senior executive pay rose by 442 percent during Clinton’s eight years in the White House, according to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, the first head of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. This was completely out of line with middle management – to say nothing of workers struggling with stagnant wages.

In 1999, average wages, discounted for inflation, had still not caught up with their 1973 level. By the mid-1990s wealth distribution in the United States was already more unequal than in supposedly class-ridden Europe, and getting worse.

Obama Succumbs

Early in his first term, Obama delivered what became known as his “economic sermon on the mount” at Georgetown University. The United States could not recover the old economy and should not want to, he stated. That economy was built on debt and speculation. It featured ever more extreme inequality, and a sinking middle class.

Obama argued that we “cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.”

But Obama is himself a Rubin protégé. He staffed his administration with Rubin acolytes and disciples – including Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers as chief economist, Peter Orzag as director of the Office of Management and Budget, Jack Lew, Michael Froman, Gene Sperling and more.

The result was a revival of the old gospel. The Obama administration rescued the banks without restructuring them. No one has yet been held accountable for what the FBI called the “epidemic of fraud” that inflated the housing bubble.

When Germany and China spurned the global consensus to move to more balanced trade, Washington chose not to react. Instead the administration pursued more of the old-style trade accords, notably with South Korea and now with much of Asia.

The president has espoused progressive tax reforms but has gained little ground in battles with Republicans. After passing the Recovery Act to save an economy in free fall, he turned prematurely to deficit reduction, undermining any chance of more spending to get the economy going and leaving Americans saddled with continued mass unemployment.

The sad fact is that the old economy is coming back. Austerity continues to starve public investments vital to our future. The banks emerged from the crisis bigger and more concentrated than ever. Despite the domestic natural gas explosion, the trade deficit is still more than $1 billion a day, with the deficit with China setting records.

Extreme inequality is getting worse. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans captured a stunning 121 percent of the income growth in the first two years after the economic collapse. Everyone else, on average, lost ground. The jobs being created offer less pay and fewer benefits than those that were lost. More than 20 million people still need full-time work.

Obama and Democrats didn’t inherit the economy that Clinton enjoyed – one buoyed by the dot-com resurgence and inflated by the bubble. Rather, they confront an economy struggling to recover from the Great Recession, still scarred by mass unemployment, falling wages and a declining middle class. The old conservative policies – even in their tempered Clinton form – offer no answers.

Nor can Democrats consolidate their potential reform majority with Clinton policies. Obama built his electoral majority on the “rising American electorate” – the young, people of color, single women. But these constituencies were hardest hit in the Great Recession and have fared poorly in the recovery. No matter how repellant Republicans may look to these voters, they are unlikely to turn out in large numbers for a party whose policies have failed them.

Democrats and the country have to move beyond the old economy and the old arguments. Obama had it right: We need a new foundation for growth – one that embraces the need for dynamic and activist government.

That agenda would include investment in infrastructure, research and education – areas vital to our future; a manufacturing policy to secure leadership in the green industrial revolution that will inevitably sweep the world; a trade policy that ends destabilizing imbalances that can’t be sustained; controls on the financial industry so it serves the real economy; and a far greater focus on ensuring that workers capture a fair share of the productivity and profit they help to generate. This would include a higher minimum wage, equal pay for women, empowered workers, curbs on perverse CEO compensation schemes and progressive tax reform.

None of this can be done in the face of the Republican Tea Party-fueled obstruction. Even a politician of Clinton’s guile would have a hard time reaching a “grand bargain” with this crowd. Change can’t be achieved by co-opting conservative themes or championing Wall Street priorities.

Democrats have to stake out their course clearly, show who is standing in the way, offer the country a clear choice and mobilize the emerging majority for change.

Moving beyond the Clinton legacy may seem unlikely – particularly because another Clinton looms so large in the party’s future. But Hillary Clinton may be exactly the leader to make the break. She was blindsided in 2008, when she assumed she was headed to a coronation rather than a contest, and ignored how much the emerging American electorate had turned against the war and the old politics. She isn’t likely to make that mistake again.

Just as Bill Clinton argued that he had to challenge the old Democrats on social issues to get elected president, Hillary Clinton will have to challenge the new Democrats on economic issues to be a successful one.

This could prove to be the real capstone of the Clintons’ extraordinary political journey. They may well have the opportunity to demonstrate that they are not only agile enough to succeed in a conservative era of reaction but bold enough to lead a new progressive era of reform.

On Tuesday, a “sinkhole” suddenly sank in Washington D.C. three blocks from the White House. Not a metaphor, but a massive hole in the road as “long as a Ford Explorer,” double the width of a train car and 17 feet deep. The asphalt eroded around a metal plate covering potholes in the street and collapsed over a sewer line that was laid in 1897. The sinkhole will take at least five days to “repair.”

There is an idiocy about our current national politics that is simply stupefying. We are sitting idly, watching, and suffering, as our nation disintegrates into a run-down backwater. Our airports are a global disgrace. Our railroads, broadband, energy grid are all outmoded by international standards. A bridge falls every other day. Our sewage systems are overwhelmed by normal use, and collapse in the extreme weather that has become the national norm. Sinkholes now are becoming a life-threatening peril.

At the same time, over 20 million people are in need of full-time work. The construction industry has still not recovered from the housing collapse. The federal government can borrow money at interest rates near zero. Yet instead of grabbing this opportunity to rebuild the country, Washington is focused on cutting budgets, an austerity that clearly costs jobs and impedes the recovery.

Any business leader with a wit of sense would say this is the perfect time to borrow money to rebuild the country, making investments now that will make us more competitive in the future. That’s why the head of the Business Roundtable, former Republican governor John Engler, says it. At the top of his wish list for the economy is borrowing money to invest in roads and infrastructure. The resulting growth will more than repay the virtually free money. We’ll end up with a more competitive economy, a healthier and modern infrastructure that will make lives easier and safer, more jobs, more income, more taxes and less debt.

This is literally a no-brainer. Yet when president proposes even a modest infrastructure bill, the Republican Congress rules it dead on arrival.

If desired, Congress could even get the investment done without adding to the debt. The Federal Reserve purchases $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities every month. Yes, every month. (It also purchases another $45 billion of Treasury bonds). This is designed to keep interest rates low – and is part of the multi-trillion dollar rescue of the big banks, helping them slowly shed the garbage in their basements.

This program – known as “quantitative easing” to befuddle observers – helps to sustain the recovery, despite the counterproductive budget austerity. But flooding the banks with money is a very inefficient way to create jobs and growth. Banks can sit on the dough, or worse, speculate across the world, gambling with what is literally the “house’s money.” Cheap money is more likely to spur mergers and acquisitions rather than new jobs.

A functional Congress would create a national infrastructure bank, designed to make vital investments in rebuilding the country. It could issue bonds that the Federal Reserve would purchase with interest rates near zero. If the Fed spend $20 billion on infrastructure bonds, it would help insure against blowing up the next bubble, while actually putting people to work doing work that has to be done.

Wall Street, of course, objects to this heretical notion. If the Fed is going to print money, then the big banks make certain they are at the door with their hands out. But there is no reason for Congress not to act – other than the bitter truth, as New York Sen. Richard Durbin famously exclaimed, that the big banks “own the place.”

“Internal improvements” used to have conservative support. Alexander Hamilton championed them. So did the Whigs under Henry Clay. Republican Abe Lincoln built the transcontinental railroads and the land grant colleges; Eisenhower the interstate highways. A lot of money was wasted. A lot of insiders got rich. But the country benefited from creating a modern, increasingly efficient infrastructure.

Now the need is pressing; the money is cheap – or free. The work is needed. It is simply idiotic that the Congress refuses to act.

We know Republicans scorn aid to the poor. Food stamps, infant nutrition, preschool, they argue, offer not a safety net, but in Rep. Paul Ryan’s words, a “hammock.” The Tea Partiers seem intent on sacking sensible regulation of the air, water, public health and worker safety.

But repairing roads and rail, building modern airports, keeping our broadband and energy grid at world class standards, making sure the sewers don’t leak, strengthening the sinews for the extreme weather that is upon us – this isn’t an ideological question. It is just common sense.

That this isn’t getting done now reveals exactly how extreme, how corrupt, and how destructive our current politics are.

Thursday on Bloomberg Television, Robert Borosage made the case for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Bank On Student Loan Fairness Act, which would set student loan interest rates at the same rate banks get from the Federal Reserve discount window:

“There is a universal consensus that we have to educate the next generation. And now college is getting priced out the reach of more and more students who have earned their way into it. What Elizabeth Warren is saying is, look, we shouldn’t be subsidizing the banks and not subsidizing the children that are our future.”

You can help press the Senate to pass the Warren bill by signing this Campaign for America’s Future/Daily Kos petition.

On July 1, interest rates on student loans will double, jumping to 6.8%, according to current law.

While the Big Banks are now enjoying interest rates of almost zero.

Enter Elizabeth Warren with her first bill as a Senator: It solves the problem by giving students the same rock-bottom interest rates as the big banks.

That’s why the Campaign for America’s Future is joining with Daily Kos to help get it passed.

Click here to tell your Senators: Co-sponsor Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Bank of Student Loan Fairness Act.

College students today already graduate with the terrible burden of an average of $25,000 in student-loan debt. Now they face the dire possibility that their student loan interest rates will double to 6.8% on July 1 if Congress fails to act.

Sen. Warren’s bill offers a simple solution: lower student loan interest rates for one year to 0.75 percent, the same rate at which the government loans money to the banks through the Federal Reserve discount window.

Sen. Warren plainly makes the case: “In effect, the American taxpayer is investing in those banks. We should make the same kind of investment in our young people who are trying to get an education.”

She’s standing up for students. It’s time to stand with her.

College students today graduate with the terrible burden of an average of $25,000 in student-loan debt. That total increases with the rising costs of tuition, even at public colleges and universities, and by the actions of our own government in letting the rates for student loans rise. If nothing is done by July 1, the rates will rise again.

Such heavy responsibilities will hold graduates back for years to come. Instead of kicking students when they are down, we should end the student debt crisis. That is why we are enthusiastically endorsing the first bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), which would lower student loan interest rates for one year to 0.75 percent, the same rate at which the government loans money to the banks through the Federal Reserve discount window. Student loan interest rates will double to 6.8 percent on July 1 without action.

By linking the interest rates students pay to the interest rates big banks pay, the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act would insure that every qualified student can afford the education that he or she has earned. Senator Warren was right on the money when she said, “In effect, the American taxpayer is investing in those banks. We should make the same kind of investment in our young people who are trying to get an education.”

We hope her colleagues in the Senate and the members of the House see how Senator Warren’s bill will brighten the future of millions of students while at the same time energize the U.S. economy.

The Senate campaign in Massachusetts will be close and hard fought.  Ed Markey, the winner of the Democratic primary, knows he has to run a bare-knuckled, knock down, full bore campaign to win.  So it is notable that one of the first appeals to his supporters is to enlist them in telling the president that they oppose his proposal to cut Social Security benefits through the so-called chained CPI.   Markey clearly realizes the president’s proposal is electoral poison — and wants to get ahead of any Republican effort to link him to the president on this issue.  Democrats across the Congress would do well  to take note.  Here’s the Markey letter

This week, President Obama will travel to Austin, Texas to call for action on jobs. The proposals the president put forth in his State of the Union address – investing in infrastructure, expanding preschool, bolstering manufacturing assistance centers, raising the minimum wage – have been blocked in the Congress, and disappeared from the public debate.

The president wants to revive his jobs agenda while still touting the economic recovery. In his commencement address at Ohio State University last weekend, he reassured students:

“While things are still hard for a lot of people, you have every reason to believe that your future is bright. You’re graduating into an economy and a job market that is steadily healing.”

The White House points to 38 straight months of private sector jobs growth, but in reality, jobs have been largely left behind in the recovery. The stock market is setting new records, but over 20 million people still are in need of full-time work. The labor force participation rate – the percentage of workers who have a job or are looking for one – is down to levels not seen since 1979. The jobs being created pay less with fewer benefits than the jobs that were lost.  As a result, inequality is still growing; the middle class is still sinking. And young people are graduating into one of the worst jobs markets since the Great Depression.

In many ways, the fact that the economy is “steadily healing” back to the old economy is the problem, not the solution. That economy featured growing inequality and a declining middle class. It was built on debt and speculative bubbles. Trade deficits hit new records as multinational companies shipped good jobs abroad.

In his first year in office, President Obama argued that we couldn’t go back to that economy and shouldn’t want to. We had to build a new foundation for growth. But in fact, gridlock in Washington has virtually ensured that we would drift back into the old economy.

Once more the Federal Reserve offers the only ballast for the economy by holding interest rates at record lows. The big banks have emerged from the recession bigger and more concentrated than ever. That virtually ensures a reach for increasing risk as we wait for the next bubble. The trade deficit is back over $1 billion a day, despite the natural gas explosion that reduces U.S. dependence on imported oil. The assault on unions has escalated. Part-time minimum-wage jobs proliferate. The richest 1 percent of the country captured a staggering 112 percent of the income growth in the first two years coming out of the recession. The 99 percent on average lost ground.

It will take a dramatic change in policy to build a new foundation for growth in this economy. The president’s proposals are but modest markers on the path forward, but barely get notice in a Washington still focused on a debate about austerity – about what to cut and how deep. This will only change if citizens organize independently and demand that Washington move. Voters will have to identify and punish those legislators who are standing in the way.

The core elements of a jobs agenda for the U.S. now are not particularly controversial. Consider a three part program:

Smart Investment

With interest rates at record lows and the construction industry still moribund, we should be grabbing this opportunity to rebuild our aged infrastructure – everything from airports to sewer systems to the electric grid – to world-class competitive standards. This is vital both for public health and for the economy. The Federal Reserve is now spending $45 billion a month buying mortgage-backed securities. This bolsters the banks and helps keep interest rates low, but it only feeds the casino economy. Why not create an infrastructure bank, and have the Federal Reserve buy its bonds? This wouldn’t add to the national debt, would build things we need and put people to work.

Any smart investment agenda would also insure that we are providing the basics in education to every child – infant nutrition, preschool, smaller classes in the early grades, after school and summer enrichment programs, good teachers and affordable college. Instead we are laying off teachers, locking kids out of Head Start and making college increasingly unaffordable. No nation can afford to waste a generation.

An American Global Strategy

The world cannot afford to go back to the unsustainable imbalances in trade that contributed directly to the financial bubble and collapse.  The nation cannot afford to let multinationals define our global strategy.  We should announce that we will balance our trade over the next five years. That will put multinationals on notice that if they want to sell in the U.S. they should build in the U.S. We should crack down on currency violations and treat mercantilist nations as they treat us.

Balanced trade should be accompanied by an aggressive industrial policy to capture a lead in the green industrial revolution that will sweep the world. We should be expanding, not cutting investment in research and development. We should seed regional renewable energy strategies, set renewable energy standards that will accelerate changes that are already beginning. The U.S. should be leading, not lagging, in the industrial frontiers, from biotechnology to nanotechnology to 3D printing.

Fair Share Strategy

Finally, we need to insure that workers capture a fair share of the profits and productivity that they help to create.  Lift the minimum wage and index it to inflation. Empower workers to organize and bargain collectively. Pass immigration reform to bring millions out from the shadows. End perverse CEO compensation policies that give executives million-dollar incentives to plunder their own companies.

This isn’t rocket science.  It isn’t comprehensive.  It is a sensible beginning to creating good jobs and reviving a middle class.  We can pay for it through progressive tax reform, with particular focus on the trillions now sheltered abroad to avoid taxation.

The president’s plans provide markers on this path. He’d invest in preschool and infrastructure, provide assistance and tax breaks to domestic manufacturers, raise the minimum wage. What’s clear is that “recovering” the old economy is a path to ruin. The broad middle class that made America exceptional will disappear. A nation of haves and have nots, of bubbles and busts, of private wealth and starved public services will be nasty, brutish and without hope.

At this point, Washington isn’t debating how to create jobs and rebuild the middle class. It is arguing only about who bears the pain in the decline. This will change only when citizens demand it. The only question is how much damage will be inflicted before that begins.

Democrats are enjoying the spectacle of Republican disarray. All of Washington is sinking in popularity, but Republicans rank lowest in public esteem. The old right-wing wedge issues – guns, gays, racial division, the war on women – now bolster Democrats rather than weaken them. Republicans in Congress are so divided, they can barely unite around naming post offices. They may not even be able to come together around an immigration reform that virtually all agree is vital for the party’s future prospects.

But for all of the Republican disarray, Democrats are in trouble. The bi-elections in 2014 come in the president’s sixth year in office. The economy and jobs will be the overwhelming issues. Voters will hold the president’s party accountable for the state of the economy. And this economy still is not working for working people.

Yes, the stock market is hitting new heights. Corporate profits are at record levels as a percentage of the economy. We’ve witnessed, as the White House repeats, 38 straight months of private sector jobs growth. Low interest rates are bringing housing back. The private economy thus far has been strong enough to overcome the austerity – tax hikes and spending cuts – that Washington is inflicting on it.

That leaves Democrats tempted to repeat the same mistake they made in 2010, trying to sell the economy we have, hoping that the economy will continue to gain momentum and arguing that we are on the right track.

Only one problem with that strategy: voters aren’t likely to buy the patter. We’re still suffering mass unemployment – over 20 million people in need of full-time work. The base of the Democratic Party – the young, people of color, single women – have been hit the hardest in the recession, and have struggled in the recovery. Wages are near record lows as a portion of the economy – and aren’t likely to rise until we get a lot closer to full employment.

And Republicans are likely to throw more obstacles in the way of recovery. The sequester cuts – designed to be abhorrent – are the default position of a dysfunctional Republican caucus. No negotiations are going on about next year’s budget. House Republicans are now talking about using the debt ceiling to exact corporate tax reform that will ask the corporations to contribute nothing to deficit reduction, while pushing for more domestic spending cuts.

The president’s position – still looking for a grand bargain – is electoral poison. He’s threatening to become the champion of cutting Social Security and Medicare in exchange for a “balanced” austerity agenda. The senior vote looms even larger in bi-elections.

The Democratic Hope

The only hope for Democrats is to make it clear which party is for jobs and which party is standing in the way. That requires more than rhetoric in an election campaign. Democrats have to champion jobs measures visibly again and again, drive them into the House Republican majority, and show over and over which party is blocking progress.

That can begin by taking up the popular parts of the agenda the president put forth in his State of the Union. Push to pass an increase in the minimum wage in the Senate. Start a discharge petition in the House, mobilize activists to demand that every legislator of both parties sign up to put the measure before the House.  Engage Organizing for America in a fight that will rouse the Democratic base.

Push an education package that pays for universal preschool by closing tax havens abroad, and provides resources to put teachers back to work. Wage a campaign across the country for an infrastructure bank that will rebuild our decrepit infrastructure, as a centerpiece of a strategy to revive manufacturing in the U.S. Take up the president’s call for retrofitting buildings and stump on it across the country.

If Democrats continue to be mired in a debate with Republicans about austerity, giving voters the choice of a “balanced” plan versus the Republican spending- cuts-only position, they are likely to win the editorial pages and lose the coming elections, erasing any hope for the last years of the Obama presidency.

This effort would best be led by the president who has the bully pulpit. He has been notoriously unwilling to drive campaigns that he thinks can’t be won. And he’s showed little concern about electing Democrats in any of his campaigns. But his own reelection gained momentum when the president put out a jobs agenda that had no chance in Congress in the fall of 2011 and went to Osawatomie, Kansas to define the election as a battle for the middle class.

He’s going to get nothing beyond punitive immigration reform and extended grief from this dysfunctional Republican Congress. He’d be better off hitting the stump than taking the advice of Washington pundits and having a drink with Mitch McConnell. The president has to stop peddling austerity and start talking jobs.  But this will take more than sporadic events and a few good speeches.

Senate Democrats have to drive the agenda; the president has to help sell it; and fierce pressure must be put on the House Republican majority (and the Senate obstructionist minority) to pass it – or to be exposed as obstructing even common-sense measures moving forward.

Even if the president chooses to stay above the fray, Democrats in the Congress must rouse themselves to act. Faced with a choice of Democrats trying to sell this economy as on the right track and Republican zealots, voters are likely to stay home in large numbers. Most of those coming out will be voting to throw the bums out.  Democrats ought to try to make clear just who the bums are.