In the best of all worlds, President Obama's proposal last week to invest $50 billion to front-load the rebuilding of the nation's crumbling transportation infrastructure would make perfect sense. After all, Americans need jobs, the economy needs a boost, and the nation needs to repair and modernize its transport system if it hopes to compete and prosper in the years ahead.

But we don't live in the best of all worlds. We live in the midst of a cynical political drama in which opponents rip everything Obama proposes, no matter the merits; in which the public is told to regard every move with suspicion, and in which the country's best interests are routinely sacrificed for partisan advantage.

Obama still operates as if he's a president when, in fact, the political culture has shifted toward a parliamentary style in which the opposition's sole aim is to topple the sitting government and in which the next campaign begins the moment the last election ends.

By that reckoning, Obama's transportation initiative might have made sense 18 months ago when he was still a fresh face lining up his program. But now, on the eve of a difficult midterm election, fixing roads and bridges comes across as a last-ditch gimmick. No one in either party gives it a chance of passing this year. And next year? With Republicans poised to reclaim the House and possibly the Senate, anything Congress passes won't carry much of the president's imprint -- or Rep. Jim Oberstar's imprint, for that matter.

The Minnesota congressman, for the moment, still chairs the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He had assumed that Obama's election would give him the opportunity to redesign the nation's transportation spending pattern to reflect changing needs -- less driving, less dependence on oil, more choices, more livability. But in June 2009, on the day before he was to announce his six-year, $500 billion program, the White House called to say it wanted to delay a transportation bill until 2011. Oberstar fumed. Now, it appears that transportation's future will carry a Republican imprint: less transit, more driving, more tolling, and attempts to privatize roads.

Obama's fear was a familiar one: increasing the gasoline tax. Roads have buckled under the increased driving of recent decades because politicians have resisted raising the taxes needed for repair and expansion, and because the value of the gas tax has been eroded by higher fuel efficiency. The federal gas tax hadn't been raised since 1993, and Obama wasn't willing to buck that trend, especially in a recession.

His initiative floated last week would be essentially a downpayment on the bigger plan. It would be funded largely by closing tax loopholes for oil companies. Also included would be a public-private infrastructure bank to lend money for innovative projects while offsetting the problem of congressional earmarks. The goal, Obama said, was to pave 150,000 miles of roads, fix 4,000 miles of rail and restore 150 miles of runway. He offered no estimate of the number of jobs those projects would provide. Nor had he given Democratic leaders in Congress more than a few hours notice before announcing the plan at a Labor Day rally in Milwaukee.

Republicans immediately slammed the idea, equating it to the initial stimulus attempt that they've branded a failure. But if it were possible to clear away the partisan fog that envelopes public policy these days, Obama's initiative would make perfect sense. After all, the nation needs jobs, needs an economic boost and needs a competitive infrastructure.