A quick succession of high-profile events this week gives President Barack Obama a critical opportunity to reboot his administration’s handling of the nation’s financial crisis.
Scattered vitriol in the past two weeks following the rollout of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s circumspect bank bailout plan and criticism of the president’s foreclosure relief proposal all threw the White House off stride.
Now the Obama team is hoping a nationally televised joint address to Congress, a summit on fiscal responsibility at the White House and release of the massive federal budget will help restore confidence in the Obama administration’s economic stewardship.
“The president certainly has said this, for quite some time, that he believes it is very important to be honest with the American people, about the struggles and the challenges that we face,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Obama’s fiscal reckoning comes as he continues to push hope amid unprecedented federal deficit spending. Markets are faltering, and his public support is beginning to erode.
Two polls last week, by Fox News and CNN, showed the president’s public approval ratings dropping closer to 60 percent than the 70 percent or more that he enjoyed after his inauguration. And the financial markets — another poll of sorts — also continued their resolute slide, despite the best efforts of the administration to restore confidence.
Obama’s address to Congress and the nation Tuesday, a first-term variation on a State of the Union address, is expected to lay out specific ideas for energy, health care and other upcoming administration agenda items.
Delivered at the Capital to a joint session, the speech is nevertheless largely directed to the prime-time television audience at home — his second such appearance, after a formal evening news conference earlier this month.
For the administration, the speech is an opportunity to regain control of the message, something it tends to lose in a heated debate.
“He needs to get back in charge of it,” said Cindy Rugeley, a political scientist at Texas Tech. “When he was trying to be bipartisan and work with the Republicans on the stimulus bill, he gave up his bully pulpit — now he’s got to come back in and talk to the American people.”
Today, Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. will host a daylong summit on fiscal responsibility. More than 130 lawmakers, academics, economists and others are set to break into groups and brainstorm on key issues, which will later be reported back
to Obama.
“The summit’s a first step in the process of beginning to lay out how we can bring down the deficit and put our economy back on sound financial footing,” Gibbs said.
Stephen Hess, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, called the summit a “public relations” effort, but also part of a larger program to move the economic dialogue past the broader themes of Obama’s inaugural address and into clearer specifics.
“The summit is to remind everyone, including the more conservative part of the country, there is a real cost to this incredible spending we have to go through, and that we have to at least be aware of that,” Hess said.
Thursday’s budget release portends to be a crucial test for the new administration. Historically, the federal budget provides a road map of a president’s priorities and agenda.
But Obama has tasked his budget officials with trimming the estimated $3.5 trillion budget of wasteful spending and ineffective programs.
The Obama administration also took steps to eliminate accounting methods used during the Bush administration they say made the deficit projections look smaller.
Still looming are Obama’s plans to overhaul the nation’s health care system — not expected to be a budget-saver, to say the least — and the always-looming issue of funding Social Security and other entitlements in the future.
For now, when it’s still early days, Obama can weather the drumbeat of downbeat job reports and other economic indicators — because politically, none of it is technically his fault.
But Americans, notoriously short of patience despite what they tell pollsters, will soon be looking for results.
“People are scared, they are real scared, and the economy is real bad,” Rugeley said. “He is going to have to lower their expectations for an instant turnaround and start selling a realistic vision of what is going to happen.”
