The Obama administration Thursday insisted its $787 billion stimulus program geared toward job creation was working, despite new figures showing the nation’s jobless rate climbed to its highest point in nearly 26 years.
“We’ve taken some extraordinary measures to blunt the hard edges of the worst recession of our lifetime,” said President Barack Obama. “But as I’ve said from the moment that I walked into the door of this White House, it took years for us to get into this mess, and it will take us more than a few months to turn it around.”
Unemployment rose to 9.5 percent in June, and economists and White House officials predict it will reach 10 percent in the next few months. With little proof that Obama’s accelerated federal spending is creating jobs, it also appeared that any prospects for a second round of stimulus also were dimming.
“It’s a high number and it has real consequences,” said John Fortier, a political expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “As we go further along, at some point Obama is going to get tagged with this economy, and they won’t be able to keep blaming [former President George W.] Bush anymore.”
Obama since his election has targeted key electoral states such as Ohio, Missouri, Indiana and others hit hard by the recession, making frequent trips to stay visible promoting health care and his economic agenda.
Those states will be central to his re-election efforts, and a second infusion of federal stimulus spending could help Obama’s fortunes. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration may consider requests from individual states. The administration has so far not ruled out a second stimulus.
“The administration will evaluate and take action on whatever we believe will help the economy,” Gibbs said. “That’s what we’ve done up to this point, and that’s what we’ll continue to do.”
With so much of the administration’s major legislative agenda still pending in Congress — notably, health care reform and energy — it’s unlikely the White House would push for a second nationwide round of stimulus, even in the also unlikely event that Congress would support it.
“Stimulus may have lost some of its attractiveness,” said Stephen Hess, a White House expert at the Brookings Institution. “The stimulus bill hasn’t produced the instant results that were at least suggested and in some cases promised as it moved away from being about shovel-ready projects and on to other things that have longer lead times.”
Obama, who has said job creation is the best measuring stick of his stimulus spending, said more recently that he did not believe a second round of stimulus was needed — yet.
Administration officials continued to plead for more time to show results from the massive federal spending program — Gibbs said repeatedly that Obama “sees this [recession] through the eyes of the American people.”
“The stimulus is working, the stimulus plan is injecting money into the economy,” Gibbs said.
