White House officials and prominent Democrats in Congress continue to insist that President Obama’s jobs package has a real shot of becoming law, even though House Republican leaders have declared it dead on arrival, and Senate Democratic leaders haven’t even scheduled a vote on the sweeping bill.

On ABC’s “Top Line” today, Rep. Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, told us the president needs to continue to fight for the full package of tax cuts and spending increases, so as not to see it broken into pieces that would make it meaningless.

“If you don’t push for the whole thing, you’ll end up with a dribble, so you have to paint the larger picture,” said Levin, D-Mich. “And that’s what we’re trying to do and the president is doing. And I say, ‘Keep going, Mr. President.’ ”

Levin said the package “for sure” has a chance of passing Congress.

“Hopefully it will happen. So much in the jobs proposal really comes from ideas that were supported by both parties,” Levin told us. “Just travel around the roads. You see the needs here. … There’s an absolute need to pass the jobs bill to get America growing, and we’ve got to put political interests aside.”

“The public wants action. The public wants action,” he said. “Necessity will be the mother of action. We’ll see. The public says we need to act. That’s why the president’s out there.”

But he said it will be tough to work with Republicans: “They not only have drawn lines in the sand, but in a sense they’ve had some feet in the cement on, for example, the need for more revenues.”