Obama stumps for stimulus bill

Back to the future for Obama with campaign-style trips
breitbart.com (Also see President Obama -- diminishing himself to serve Speaker Pelosi at Power Line.)

Barack Obama might have thought he left the campaign trail behind, but just three weeks into his presidency, he will be on the stump again this week, selling not himself, but his economic rescue plan. Obama will tred[sic] political ground familiar from his two-year election odyssey to defend the package in Indiana and Florida on Monday and Tuesday against Republican complaints that it is too expensive and will not work. The president peeled both states out of the Republican column in November's election, and now both are paying a painful price from the crippling wave of unemployment sparked by the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

The two townhall meetings are part of what is now a full throttle campaign effort to sell the 800-billion-dollar plus stimulus package, which is slowly working its way through Congress with a deadline looming at the end of next week.

Late Monday, Obama will hold a primetime news conference -- the first of his presidency -- from the East Room of the White House, and he has urged supporters to hold weekend house parties to build momentum for the package.

"The scale and scope of this plan is right, and the time for action is now," Obama said Saturday, in his latest urgent call for Congress to send him the tax-cutting and spending plan designed to create or save three million jobs.

The president began pushing the stimulus plan by courting Republican support, hoping for bumper majorities to herald his administration and that he could call on again for tough issues like healthcare and climate change.

But his calls for bipartisanship dissolved in the face of opposition from Republicans, with only a few opposition lawmakers expected to back the Senate compromise on the bill when a vote comes as early as Monday.

Now, Obama is firing off fierce attacks on Republicans to match his campaign-style travel to set the stage for haggling between the two legislative chambers on a final bill that will require high-stakes votes.

"Let's be clear: we can't expect relief from the tired old theories that, in eight short years, doubled the national debt, threw our economy into a tailspin and led us into this mess in the first place," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday.

"We can't rely on a losing formula that offers only tax cuts as the answer to all our problems while ignoring our fundamental economic challenges -- the crushing cost of health care or the inadequate state of so many schools; our addiction to foreign oil or our crumbling roads, bridges and levees."

The change of tone has not been lost on Republicans, who are using the showdown over the stimulus plan to test the new president and build their own morale after successive electoral drubbings.

"We had an opportunity to do this in a truly bipartisan basis and the president said originally he had hoped to get 80 votes," said Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.

"It appears that, the way this has developed, there will be some bipartisan support, but not a lot -- and it's not likely, in the judgment of most of us, to produce the result that we all desire."

Obama's travels on Monday and Tuesday will mark a change of strategy after he largely confined his lobbying for the stimulus plan to in and around Washington, meeting congressional leaders and key lawmakers.

But as the package got bogged down in Congress, critics suggested that Obama would do better by taking his case directly to the American people, especially as polls showed support for the stimulus plan slipping.

His spokesman, Robert Gibbs, denied that the president was hoping to pressure vulnerable lawmakers by flying into the historical battleground states of Florida and Indiana on Air Force One.

"This is not designed specifically to cajole any member of Congress," Gibbs said.

"It's an effort for the president to talk to the American people about what's at stake."

Obama will travel to Elkhart, Indiana where unemployment has rocketed from 4.7 percent to 15.3 percent over the past year.

On Tuesday, the president will fly to Fort Myers, Florida, for a second townhall meeting -- the kind of event he held almost daily for two years on the campaign trail.

Last year, the unemployment rate in Fort Myers stood at six percent, but it has now hit 10 percent.