President Barack Obama has hardly been out of the spotlight lately, barnstorming around the country for his new jobs plan, barking at the GOP during a spate of Democratic fundraisers and sitting down for a series of TV interviews with George Stephanopolous and local reporters in battleground states.
But he hasn?t faced the melee of a full White House press conference since July 15 ? and the West Wing pack has plenty of questions to ask Obama, most of them concerning the intersection of the economy and the 2012 campaign.
Continue ReadingHere are five likely queries:
1. Why so late on jobs?
In a similar press conference a little over a year ago ? just after the shellacking of the 2010 midterms ? Obama bowed to the prevailing political reality that had propelled the GOP to its stunning take-back of the House and state houses, ditching a stimulus mindset for the mantra of cut, cut, cut.
The administration?s fiscal doves, led by the likes of Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee and, to a lesser extent, Gene Sperling, were acutely mindful of the nasty history lesson offered by FDR?s too-quick exit from job-creation mode in 1937 and became in short order the agents of a policy that blended a healthy dollop of debt reduction with a much-circumscribed menu of stimulus options.
To be sure, the administration engaged in stealthy stimulus guerrilla warfare, espousing deficit reduction in front of the cameras, while quietly grabbing whatever stimulus weapons left in the arsenal. The result was an end-of-year tax extension deal that included an extension of unemployment benefits and several key tax breaks to aid job creation.
Undeniably, however, Obama?s embrace of the cut-first doctrine ? which seemed to resonate with independent voters at the time? changed the national conversation at a time when the underlying economy was steadily, inexorably slipping toward a second downturn thanks to Europe?s slow-motion meltdown. Moreover, administration officials (during sundry lunches with reporters around town this spring) offered a too-rosy view of economic conditions.
Once again, Obama is back on the Roosevelt wagon, pushing for his $447 billion jobs plan, hammering his opponents with FDR-like gusto and generally delighting his base. But he?s got two immense problems, one economic and one political, both tied to his tardiness. The economy may be slipping beyond his grasp ? and so are independents, who are now demanding jobs, not cuts.
2. The Occupy Wall Street protests: With ?em or against ?em?
For two years, anxious Democrats have looked at the tea party with a combination of fear, loathing and envy. Now, a wild and amorphous batch of lefties, anarchists, union members and disaffected, unemployed young people have sparked what appears to be a spontaneous national uprising against the lords of finance.
Obama campaign officials are excited ? but a little wary, for the same reasons that GOP leadership kept its initial distance from the tea partiers. The extremism of a small minority can be a real liability.
So far, the White House in the person of press secretary Jay Carney has pussy-footed, saying only that Obama and company ?understand? the frustration.
That won?t cut it, especially given the recent claims, in Ron Suskind?s ?Confidence Men,? that the president and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were too easy on TARP recipients, refusing to demand a bottom-up restructuring of the industry despite the passage of Dodd-Frank.
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