The White House's PR focus is becoming pretty clear: From now until, oh let's say November 2012, they're going to be spending lots of time calling attention to business-friendly initiatives, many of which involve spending money, to feed the narrative that they're working hard to create jobs while Republicans are busy worrying about things like how they can take away people's health care. Here's the latest "White House White Board", about a new initiative to spread coverage of high-speed wireless:
(One minor chart-geek quibble: In the bottom graph, Goolsbee is representing one-dimensional pieces of data (the number of downloads) with two-dimensional icons, so 12 billion downloads is represented by a box of 144 square units, which looks 11 times as big as the box representing the 3.6 billion downloads, when in fact it should be only 3.33 times as big. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.)
I'm guessing the cumulative effect of these initiatives on public opinion will be good for the administration. And it ought to be -- facilitating economic activity is one of the main purposes, if not the main purpose, of infrastructure investment, and if nothing else they're showing people specific things they're doing to get the economy going. Of course, this all might be irrelevant when we get our broadband blimps that make an entire city into one giant hotspot.
