A new New Deal, Tennessee style

Even with growing talk of the recession's end, unemployment continues to rise, leading many critics of the Obama administration to ask when, exactly, the much-touted stimulus jobs will arrive. Having cast their vote for a big government solution, even some of the President's supporters are beginning to wonder if they have been led to a bureaucratic dead-end.

In late 2008, much of Obama's recovery rhetoric was based around the idea of stimulus-based job creation. At the time, the President-elect indicated that the country would ride back to solvency on the back of "the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950's." At the same time, Obama promised "the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen." From health care to education to broadband, the answer to the country's ills seemed to lie in new jobs.