(Jim Bourg/Reuters)

The key fact to understand about the bill, delicately left unmentioned by the American Crossroads memo, is that Americans want to do all the things Obama proposes. By a twenty-point margin, they favor funding new road construction and a payroll tax cut. By a 30-point margin, they agree with higher taxes on the rich to cut the long-term deficit. They support helping stave off layoffs of police officers, firefighters, and teachers by a 50-point margin. How do you fight that? You redefine the issue as a generalization. People don’t like firing police officers and teachers? Fine, just call them “union workers[.]”

Jonathan Chait looks at the polling memo produced for Karl Rove 's American Crossroads on how to kill President Obama's jobs bill. Jed Lewison previously highlighted the memo's origin in fear ; Chait points to two key strategies it promotes:

The memo (warning: Karl Rove PDF) found that if you describe Obama's proposal to "give billions to states to stop layoffs of teachers and firefighters," 70 percent of them favored it. But let's say you describe it as "giv[ing] billions to states to keep government union workers on the payroll." Support drops dramatically.

That's exactly why it's so important to always remind people that we're talking about police officers and teachers and nurses and firefighters and librarians and custodians and construction workers, no matter how much the repetition can make you feel like you're talking about the Village People.

Chait also highlights how the memo supports the Republican strategy of opposition to every damn thing that Obama wants or that could improve the economy:

When one party is unanimously opposed to something, and the other party is disagreeing about it, many people figure it’s a bad idea. This was an insight Mitch McConnell grasped from the outset of Obama’s presidency, announcing that unified Republican opposition would help make the president’s policies unpopular. Accordingly, American Crossroads finds that the mere fact of Republican unanimity, and Democratic lack thereof, ranks among its most persuasive arguments against the bill[.]

They're pushing an agenda the American people do not want to see imposed. But they've got a lot of money to push it with, they're good at pushing it, and demonizing workers and obstructing progress are among their most powerful weapons.