Obama takes on Dems, GOP in his recovery plan

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 (UPI) -- President-elect Barack Obama has boldly urged rapid approval of his $775 billion economic rescue plan, while new figures released Friday showed the U.S. economy lost 524,000 jobs last month, with 11 million Americans now out of work.

Obama hit the ground running Thursday when he opened the legislative battle to get his emergency stimulus package passed by Congress to rescue the American economy.

Obama was bold in a traditional way when he gave his speech at George Mason University in Virginia, urging Congress to move fast in enacting his giant $775 billion stimulus package to fight the growing economic recession, the worst the United States has seen in more than 70 years.

The timing of his speech alone was unprecedented since the Great Depression. The federal government reported Friday that the U.S. economy lost 524,000 jobs in December alone, bringing the total number of unemployed to more than 11 million. The jobless rate is now 7.2 percent, the worst in 15 years, and some 2.6 million jobs were lost in 2008.

Obama recognized the gravity of the crisis and therefore did not even wait until his inauguration on Jan. 20 to devote an entire speech to the challenge and his intended response to it. By contrast, outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush did not devote a single entire speech to financial and economic affairs for virtually his entire presidency. He was only forced to give one after the catastrophic fiscal meltdown wiped out most of the major investment banks on Wall Street in September.

Since then, Bush has been conspicuous by his absence from any activist or leadership role in grappling with the crisis. His passivity in such times has been unprecedented and contrasts even with Republican President Herbert Hoover, who stayed in the public eye to his last hours in office in 1933 with his efforts to enact and enforce repeated -- and entirely unsuccessful -- activist measures to fight the Great Depression.

Obama has not challenged Bush's policies on the Gaza crisis in the Middle East. But he has not applied that "only one president at a time" principle when it comes to the arguably much graver crisis threatening the domestic U.S. economy. In this area, the president-elect is clearly acting presidential -- and the White House and Republicans generally are not complaining.

There is no precedent for this in modern times. Abraham Lincoln was later faulted for being too passive, rather than too activist, during the crucial months during his transition period in 1860-61 when the Southern states were seceding from the Union to form the Confederacy. And in 1933 President-elect Franklin Roosevelt was reviled by Hoover because he refused to endorse Hoover's policies. Yet Bush has remained entirely silent and has been, if anything, supportive of Obama's assumption of a leadership role in the current crisis.

This passivity has been entirely consistent with Bush's initial reaction to many previous crises, and it also reflects his lack of interest in any serious economic policymaking beyond slashing taxes, running up record deficits and keeping interest rates virtually permanently at record lows through most of his two terms in office.

The speech itself was typical Obama, trying to educate, reassure and persuade at the same time, setting his pitch in a broad context, with a moral component and applying some rhetorical flourishes. In these qualities, it reflected not so much President John F. Kennedy, who Obama has widely acknowledged as his personal hero, but Franklin Roosevelt in his classic speeches and radio broadcasts during the 1930s.

But impressive as the speech was, the devil is in the details, and the details insofar as Obama provided them -- and the speech was thin on specifics -- are not playing too well with senior Democrats in Congress.

The speech was accompanied by an intense lobbying campaign with Obama aides meeting Democrats on the Hill. But while Obama recognizes the importance of having his economic package enacted as soon as possible after he takes office on Jan. 20, top leaders of his own party are dragging their feet on doing so.

More liberal leaders of the party, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the speaker of the House of Representatives, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, all have expressed skepticism about aspects of the package.

In particular, they are all unhappy about the proposed tax cuts and credits. They argue that people fearful of losing their jobs are more likely to save a tax refund than go on a spending spree with it. They also dislike the job credits for employers making new hires.

Obama remains hopeful of bipartisan support for his rescue package, but more and more Republicans are becoming skeptical of the Keynesian spend-your-way-out-of-recession approach, given the unexpectedly large deficit prediction of $1.2 trillion that was revealed this week by the Congressional Budget Office. In other words, Obama's campaign message of "hope and change" is about to collide head-on with the slow, cautious, fussy, wheeling and dealing legislative process on Capitol Hill.

At least no one doubts the problem is real. A report Thursday showed that the numbers of Americans drawing unemployment benefits were at the highest level since 1982 -- even though the numbers of new sign-ups were lower than expected.

Obama risks losing liberals because of the tax cuts he included in the plan, and he risks losing conservatives because of the huge increase in the U.S. government's annual budget deficit that it would cause. But at least he showed he intends to be an activist president and offer real leadership, in contrast to Bush's "Silence of the Lambs" policy that let the U.S. economy slide to the brink of ruin. In times of crisis, national leaders seldom go wrong by acting boldly, even if they have not been inaugurated yet.