The surest bet on Capitol Hill Tuesday was that President Obama's jobs bill will not move at mach speed toward any signing ceremony this month. Maybe not in October, either.

And while that may be bad news if the package promises new jobs immediately, it’s not a huge surprise to the deliberative legislative process, and it could be a boon to a president who wants time to make his political case to voters. Obama traveled to Ohio, a battleground state, Tuesday to sell his new bill. He will be in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Wednesday, focusing on how his plan would help small businesses.

The president’s next step after delivering his $447 billion measure to Congress on Monday -- along with $467 billion in proposed tax hikes to cover those costs -- is to figure out what lawmakers will do with his ideas. The president and some of his spokesmen offered slightly conflicting messages Tuesday about whether the bill should be embraced as a whole or could be carved up into bite-sized morsels for easier congressional approval.

David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s Chicago-based senior adviser, said Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America”: “We’re not in a negotiation to break up this package. It’s not an a la carte menu.” Soon after, White House National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling and White House press secretary Jay Carney, appearing separately, clarified that if Congress cherry-picks from among Obama’s growth ingredients, that’s fine with the president.

Sperling said in a speech Tuesday that the jobs package is a "plan that works best together," but if Congress passed select provisions, the White House would greet a piecemeal effort as "partial progress, and [the president] would fight and fight and fight to get the other portions through.”

Carney told reporters: “We think all of the measures are good. But if you’re saying, if Congress sent us the portion that would ensure that teachers went back to work, yes, the president would sign it. And then he would press for the other provisions. If they sent us the payroll tax cut, we would sign it, and press for the other provisions.”

On the Hill, Republican lawmakers and their staffs seized on the mixed signals with glee, asserting that Obama just five days ago turned “pass this bill” into a national political mantra. “Pass a provision” -- if that is the president’s practical message to lawmakers -- supposedly weakens Obama’s chances of lowering unemployment swiftly, and dilutes the potency of his political rhetoric, GOP sources said.

“They blew up their own plan,” one Senate Republican aide told RCP. “They look feckless.”

Beyond those considerations, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle made clear Tuesday they are all over the map on legislative strategy, and have not settled on an action plan or plans that knit perfectly with competing political and policy goals.

There are lawmakers who want to act rapidly to try to boost hiring, whether it involves voting on an entire bill or specific ideas that can pass. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, the ranking Republican on the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee and a moderate, said she is firmly in this camp.

“I don’t want to wait until the super committee makes decisions in November and December,” Snowe said. If lawmakers wait to merge a jobs-focused stimulus plan into the deficit-cutting work of the special congressional joint panel that must recommend at least $1.2 trillion in budget savings by Nov. 23, that delay is unacceptable, she added.

“My view is that’s too long to wait for where people are at in this unemployment environment,” Snowe explained, saying she believes consumer and market confidence would rise if Congress quickly came together to pass discrete ideas that could help create jobs. “Find common ground and start moving it forward,” she advocated. “It’s an emergency. . . . If you have to take them up one by one or several at a time, start moving it because there is that urgency. People are depending on our action, and not a moment too soon.”