Create more jobs, everybody's happy
Put the right people in the room, give them the right incentives and the partisan political gridlock that we have begun to take for granted can evaporate.
That's the lesson from a meeting this week among local elected officials, many of them Republicans, local business leaders, many of them strong backers of the Republican Party, and the junior senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand, a rising star in the Democratic Party.
Come Election Day 2012, when she runs for a full term, who knows if the smiling people in the room will vote for her? But when she was in the House, Gillibrand was the kind of Democrat whom lots of Republicans could support, even if they might not say so in public.
From what they heard and the way they responded Tuesday to her package of bills to help improve manufacturing in New York and create jobs, these unnatural allies might turn into not-so-secret backers.
The issues they discussed and the solutions they studied were easy to appreciate. She has a package of bills that includes grants to smaller companies to expand or at least retain workers. That is a clear winner with the local business community, which is looking for help to end the loss of manufacturing jobs and create incentives for investment. The money would help boost activity in the right ways as well, focusing on clean energy technology and targeting regions that used to be the heart of the state's manufacturing economy.
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