Who is Confused?

An interesting paragraph from a New Republic profile of Scott Brown, entitled "Mr. America":

Perhaps most intriguingly of all, Brown has sometimes exploited anxiety about jobs as a reason to oppose … jobs-related legislation. In doing so, he’s picked up on a paradox that defines the political zeitgeist: Even though Americans are more concerned about jobs than anything else, they don’t seem to appreciate the factors that help create them. In the same NBC poll in which voters overwhelmingly say jobs should be the government’s top priority, they also say, by nearly a two-to-one margin, that they’d prefer the government attend to the deficit even if it delays the economic recovery. So, according to the poll, voters care much more about jobs than the deficit, but much more about the deficit than the economy. Where exactly are the jobs supposed to come from?

Well, private investment? One can disagree with the conservative approach to economic growth, that by rewarding private investment (keeping taxes low and not crowding it out of the financial markets with excessive government borrowing) but note that the author here, Noam Scheiber, dismisses the possibility. If you think that reducing the deficit is conducive to or even just compatible with creating jobs you are simply confused. All of the smart people know that deficit spending by the government is the way to create jobs and if you disagree you are merely confused. "Mr. America" is used here as a way of saying 'not too bright.'