The RNC has a new ad out today called “Sound Familiar?”, which turns out to be good timing, to which we’ll return in a moment.  The national news media got an advance look at Barack Obama’s new jobs plan, and it looks, well … very familiar:

With the economy struggling and his reelection campaign gearing up, President Barack Obama plans to propose a jobs package worth several hundred billion dollars, mostly in tax cuts, infrastructure spending, and direct aid to state and local governments, according to reports on Wednesday.

The plan’s price tag is roughly $300 billion, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News and CNN reported. The Washington Post pegged it at least $200 billion, while The New York Times said it would come in at “several hundred billion” dollars, but didn’t report a specific figure.

Earlier today, I mentioned the Making Work Pay temporary tax cut that had practically no impact on the economy.  Guess what will be the core of the new jobs plan?

The two central measures in the Obama jobs package are expected to be a one-year extension of the payroll tax cut and an extension of expiring jobless benefits, according to the AP. Those two initiatives would total around $170 billion.

Hmm.  The MWP, extending jobless benefits, and moving up some infrastructure spending.  Gee … doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the stimulus package Obama demanded and received in 2009?  Readers will recall that Obama promised that spending $800 billion that we don’t have on those projects would keep unemployment below 8%.  For all but a single month since then, we’ve been at 9% unemployment or above while workers left the workforce in droves.

Let’s not forget that we just sent Congress on a mission to eliminate trillions in future deficit spending in a bill that cut spending next year by a whopping $7 billion. That’s 2.3% of the spending Obama will demand on Thursday evening. So what will Obama promise from the Mini-Me Porkulus for this reversal? We won’t get unemployment above 10% in the upcoming Obama recession?

Obama’s political strategy in delivering this plan to a joint session is clear, but absolutely idiotic.  He thinks that by demanding that Congress pass Son of Porkulus, he’ll put House Republicans on the spot by blocking supposedly stimulating initiatives and that he can run against GOP intransigence in 2012.  In reality, Obama will command a national stage to insist on borrowing even more money to try a set of policies that spectacularly failed the first time around in the hope that doing it again will somehow produce different results.  By raising expectations of a new approach and delivering the same failure repackaged as a new policy, Obama will have made the best possible argument against his re-election.

That brings us back to the RNC’s new ad.  Yes, things are sounding very, very familiar indeed: