President Obama was wrapping up his vacation and heading back to Washington amid dire new reports showing the economy nearly ground to a halt earlier this year.
The White House is hoping to keep the president busy this week with high-profile events, notably on foreign policy, aimed at generating a sense of purpose after a summer of grinding economic setbacks.
“He’ll be continuing to urge Republicans in the Senate to stop obstructing the important small-business bill so they can end capital gains taxes for their investments, so they can create jobs again,” said White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton. “I assure you that, alongside all the other things that are on the president’s plate, he’s continued to focus on the economy.”
The Commerce Department last week revised a report on gross domestic product for the second quarter of the year, downgrading the nation’s economic output to 1.6 percent from original estimates of 2.4 percent.
The startling news followed grim tidings on new-home sales and a surge in weekly unemployment claims — all bleak developments that give a hollow ring to the administration’s claims of “Recovery Summer.”
“Of course the president isn’t satisfied with the pace at which it’s moving,” Burton said. “But he does think that we need to keep moving with the policies that helped to get us out of the crisis and not go back to the ones that got us into it.”
With little good news to promote on the economic front, Obama’s calendar for the week is loaded with high-profile appearances on other issues.
Obama on Sunday heads to New Orleans for the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. On Tuesday he will travel to Fort Bliss, Texas, to visit the troops, followed by a national address from the Oval Office that night marking the end of combat operations in Iraq.
Later in the week, Obama will host direct peace talks between Palestinian and Israeli leaders.
All are potentially consequential, but each is also problematic for Obama, and may be beside the point in an election year dominated by economic concerns.
As a candidate, Obama promised to make rebuilding the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast a priority and made a series of promises to residents on federal spending, red tape and more.
Ahead of his visit, the administration is touting billions of dollars spent for public assistance, and levee, flood wall and school repairs.
The independent, fact-checking Politifact.org gives Obama a largely positive, but still mixed review on Katrina recovery, noting progress rebuilding schools and transportation, but stalled initiatives on helping employers and creating a catastrophe insurance program.
Another sensitive subject for Obama in New Orleans is jobs lost from the deep-water drilling ban he imposed after the BP oil spill off the coast of Louisiana.
Obama’s efforts to benefit politically from the conclusion of combat operations in Iraq is handing Republicans an opening to recall that in 2007, Obama opposed the troop surge that is now largely credited with ending the war.
“While the administration continues seeking credit for ‘ending the combat mission’ in Iraq, it is important to remember that this transition was made possible by the very surge that President Obama and Vice President Biden opposed,” House Republican leader John Boehner wrote in a pre-buttal in Human Events magazine.
