At National Journal, Jim Tankersley has a post that identifies a potential problem with President Obama’s emerging election strategy — and with the weak GOP response:

Any day now, someone is going to grab the wheel of the 2012 presidential election and yank it toward the issue that American voters overwhelmingly worry about: jobs. There are still 13 million Americans looking for work; the average time someone spends unemployed has soared to nearly 10 months. So the candidates can’t keep fighting over gas prices, contraception, and the specter of some ambiguously far-off debt crisis – can they?
If President Obama’s speech on Tuesday is any indication, maybe they can. In what was unmistakably an opening volley in his expected general election campaign against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama breezed right past jobs and landed a jump-kick square in the chest of the Republican Party’s plans for the federal budget.
Few will note or remember the presidential boiler plate on infrastructure and educational investment that Obama opened with before a gathering of top journalists. The meat of the speech – the excerpts the White House promoted in advance – was a rip-roaring attack on Republican budget-cutting.
Obama called Rep. Paul Ryan’s, R-Wis., House budget “social Darwinism” and “a Trojan horse,” and “so far to the right it makes the ‘Contract with America’ look like the ‘New Deal’.” He warned of millions of college students losing loans, national parks closed or restricted, the End of Medicare as We Know It. He said the plan would eliminate tax breaks that help the middle class (though at least one of his named examples, the home mortgage deduction, is actually quite skewed to helping the rich).
It wasn’t a speech about job-creation, or even really about growth. It was the president picking a fight over economic “fairness” and the appropriate size and scope of the federal government. Republicans fought him back on one issue: the size of federal deficits and debt.
Those were the issues Washington fiddled with last summer, up to the brink of near-default on U.S. debt, while the economy slogged through one of the many rough patches of this recovery. Voters didn’t like that attention drift then. They won’t like it now.

Could Republicans make a case in 2012 that is centered on job creation, yet that addresses the president’s ideological critique? One possibility: focus on the regulatory environment and how it stymies new firm entry, innovation, and growth. So the critique of Dodd-Frank wouldn’t just amount to vague regulation-bashing; rather, it would focus on the fact that no de novo banks were chartered in 2011, and it would argue that the best way to fight the big banks is to give new banks and small banks a fighting chance to succeed. The anti-SOPA sentiments of the conservative grassroots could be channeled into a broader celebration of anti-incumbent entrepreneurship. Most attacks on regulation are hopelessly vague and involve preaching to the choir. Perhaps something like Michael Mandel’s “pebbles-in-the-stream” critique should become part of a major policy address by the next Republican nominee — each discrete regulation could be a good thing, but the accretion of regulations is problematic.

More broadly, the GOP might consider shifting from anti-government rhetoric to value-for-money rhetoric. Value-for-money rhetoric would embrace the safety net (an article of faith for older rank-and-file Republicans in particular), yet it would emphasize that there is a clash of interests between providers and consumers of public services. Moreover, a value-for-money approach would make heroes of the best public workers — the men and women who do their jobs well, and who deserve more autonomy, flexibility, and compensation — while calling for reform of the terms of public employment.

This is probably a pipe-dream. Messages emerge in a highly decentralized fashion. But this does seem like a more effective way to address the anxieties of swing voters, and it also strikes me as closer to the truth regarding the problems facing the U.S. economy.