Friday August 7, 01:40 AM
Obama launches economic counter-attack
By Stephen Collinson
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Despite staggering job losses and nationwide financial misery, President Barack Obama has a new message for recession-weary Americans: the pulse of the sickly US economy is quickening.
But a new poll released Thursday on the eve of his 200th day in office suggests that Americans' patience with his efforts to lift the nation out of recession is wearing thin, with Obama's once sky-high job approval rating slumping to 50 percent, the lowest since his inauguration.
With his ratings eroding by the week as Republican foes slash away at his ambitious domestic reform plans, Obama is seeking to remold the debate on the economic crisis.
His efforts come ahead of new unemployment figures due Friday that analysts expect to show the jobless rate climbing to a 26-year high of 9.6 percent, ever closer to the politically perilous 10 percent barrier.
On Wednesday, Obama traveled to a corner of the midwestern state of Indiana -- where the unemployment rate is around 16 percent -- to mount a staunch defense of his 787-billion-dollar economic rescue package.
"There are those who want to seek political advantage, they want to oppose these efforts," Obama said.
"Some of them caused the problems that we have got now in the first place, and then suddenly they're blaming other folks for it."
In a fiery and partisan speech reminiscent of his barnstorming 2008 election rhetoric, Obama laid into the previous administration of George W. Bush and Republican foes he said left him a staggering economic crisis.
"The recession was years in the making, it didn't just start last month. That bank crisis didn't happen on my watch. Let's get the history straight," he said.
Obama's assault also had the feel of a pep talk to those on the edge of despair, as he unveiled a 2.4-billion-dollar program to develop electric hybrid vehicles, which he said would create tens of thousands of jobs.
"We don't give up. We don't surrender our fates to chance... this country wasn't built just by griping and complaining. It was built by hard work and taking risks."
Vice President Joe Biden, who made his own trip to a depressed corner of the midwest, in Michigan on Wednesday, is echoing Obama's call.
"I can tell you today without reservation: the Recovery Act is working," Biden said on Tuesday.
A key Obama aide on Thursday defended the stimulus plan and displayed studies she said showed it adding up to three percentage points to real gross domestic growth in the second quarter.
"After we administered the medicine, an economy that was in free fall has stabilized substantially, and now looks as though it could begin to recover in the second half of the year," said Christina Romer, head of the Council of Economic Advisers.
The administration offensive on behalf of the mammoth recovery plan, passed in the darkest days of crisis, is grounded on solid political reality.
Recent polls show Obama's popularity eroding, with growing doubts over his handling of the economy and the huge price of his government rescue interventions in the banking and industrial centers. His healthcare reform plan is facing a tough ride in Congress.
A Quinnipiac University poll said the president's job approval rating dipped to 50-versus-42 percent, a reflection of growing unease over Obama's handling of the economy and health care.
The figure is a substantial drop from the 57-33 percent approval rating he had on July 2, and far from the numbers he enjoyed in his first 100 days.
"The good news for President Barack Obama is that American voters still see him as better able to handle the economy and healthcare than Republicans in Congress," said Peter Brown of Quinnipiac's Polling Institute.
"The bad news is his margins are shrinking."
A few months ago, Republicans seeking to dent the euphoria surrounding his inauguration as the country's first black president accused Obama of talking down the economy for political gain.
Now they say it is much worse than the president is letting on, mounting a furious attack on his program in the hope of damaging vulnerable Democratic members of Congress in conservative districts.
John Boehner, the top Republican in the House of Representatives, last week promised Democrats a "long, hot summer" and assailed the rescue plan.
"They passed a trillion-dollar stimulus plan that no one read, and it's not created the jobs that Democrats said that it would."
Both Republicans and the White House know that if the stimulus plan can be cast in the public mind as a failure, Obama's political leverage and ability to pass a sweeping reform agenda could be at risk.
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