A Second First Term: Meet Obama's new agenda, same as the old agenda, only less

(WSJ) Barack Obama won the Presidency in 2008 as the anti-George W. Bush and in 2012 he's been trying to win again as the anti-Mitt Romney, without elaborating much of a second-term agenda. Two weeks before Election Day, we now know why. His new ambitions look a lot like his old ambitions, except stuck on repeat.

On Tuesday Mr. Obama finally tried to give the future more definition with a new plan, except it isn't new and barely qualifies as a plan. "I've laid out a plan for jobs and middle-class security," he claimed in Delray Beach, Florida, brandishing a 20-page brochure titled "A Plan for Jobs and Middle-Class Security" and going on to invoke his "plan" another dozen-odd times. "I won't be running the okey doke on you," he added.

Voters may okey doke themselves if they believe this document, which is heavy on backward-looking and discredited factoids and light on economic specifics. For example, Mr. Obama wants to spend money to hire 100,000 math and science teachers for public schools. Isn't that what happened in 2009? And didn't his own Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, say that class size barely matters to education outcomes?

The President says he'll use community colleges to train another two million workers "for good jobs that actually exist," perhaps to distinguish these from the jobs he said the 2009 stimulus would create but actually didn't. And he says he'll create a million new manufacturing jobs by 2016 via a new temporary tax credit for U.S. companies that expand domestic hiring.

All of this is merely a kind of Junior Achievement version of the stimulus, trying to create jobs with more government spending that isn't affordable, or temporary tax favors that fail because they are, well, temporary. Businesses hire based on total employee costs, not one-off tax benefits. Since 2009 the country has lost 610,000 net manufacturing jobs, despite such preferences.

The only thing close to a real new idea is Mr. Obama's pose as Cheerleader in Chief for oil and natural gas production. But what's new is Mr. Obama's support, not the production, which he has had nothing to do with. He's now climbed aboard the caboose of this train because he can see that it's been a winning issue for Mr. Romney.

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