Obama pushes for stimulus package

Washington: President Barack Obama pushed for Senate approval of his gigantic economic stimulus plan on Friday as he turned to a team of outside advisers to help him pull the US economy out of its tailspin.

The nearly $1 trillion package is Obama's top legislative priority in his early presidency, its urgency highlighted by a Friday report that US unemployment hit its highest level since 1974.

The package's passage would be a huge relief for the president, who has struggled to win the backing he sought from opposition Republicans.

It would cap a difficult week in which Obama saw some of his key appointments delayed or derailed because of tax problems.

Democratic and Republican moderates in the Senate were working to scale down the stimulus package in hopes of winning enough votes for passage later Friday.

The Labor Department reported that employers slashed payrolls by 598,000 in January, the most since the end of 1974, catapulting the unemployment rate to 7.6 per cent. The rate is the highest since September 1992.

Since his January20 inauguration, the president repeatedly has reached across the aisle to resistant Republicans as the stimulus plan has wound its way through the Democratic-controlled Congress.

But even as he continued to make gestures of bipartisanship, he has sharpened his tone as he seeks to sell the pricey package to both the public and Republican lawmakers who want less spending and more tax cuts.

In a feisty late Thursday speech, he implored House Democrats to reject delaying tactics and political gamesmanship and keep a promise to voters who booted Republicans from power.

"They didn't vote for the status quo; they sent us here to bring change. We owe it to them to deliver," the president said Thursday, eliciting cheers and applause from Democrats gathered for a three-day retreat in Williamsburg, Virginia.

"This is not a game," he added. "This is not a contest for who's in power and who's up and who's down."

While the Democrats' majority in the House of Representatives allowed them to pass their $819 billion version of the stimulus package even though they won no Republican support, Senate passage had proved far more difficult.

Because of Senate rules, a simple majority, which the Democrats hold, was not sufficient for passage of their plan because of rules in the upper chamber that require 60 out of 100 votes to overcome an opposition filibuster — a parliamentary delaying tactic that can effectively kill any piece of legislation.

A group of nearly 20 moderates from both parties — more Democrats than Republicans — huddled off and on all day Thursday in hopes of cutting as much as $100 billion from Obama's plan, which ballooned to $937 billion on the Senate floor, with further add-ons possible during a long day of votes Friday.

"We are not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin," Obama said — an implicit criticism of the Republicans that were in power during that period.

Obama said the package 'is not going to be absolutely perfect,' and that no one is going to get everything they want in it. But he said the plan's scope is right and he reiterated his message that inaction would bring catastrophe.

The president was to announce members of his economic team Friday as the White House braced for more bad news in the unemployment report for January. Obama planned to use the Economic Recovery Advisory Board announcement as a way to address the millions of out-of-work Americans.

Another Cabinet nominee hit an obstacle Thursday — a Senate panel abruptly postponed a confirmation vote on Labor Secretary nominee Hilda Solis after revelations that her husband had some tax problems.

While tax problems have dogged several of Obama's nominees — the latest forcing former Senator Tom Daschle to withdraw his nomination as health secretary — administration officials say they are not blaming Solis for her husband's actions.

Seeking to avoid distractions from his Cabinet choices, Obama has in recent days reminded the Republicans who is in charge now — and on whose watch the economy collapsed.

"I found this deficit when I showed up," Obama said, earning a standing ovation. "I found this national debt doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me when I stepped into the Oval Office."

One by one, he rejected arguments from Republican critics.

He said tax cuts alone as a way to stimulate the economy are 'a losing formula.' He defended how quickly the bill is moving through Congress and belittled those who call the measure simply a spending bill. "What do you think a stimulus is? That's the whole point!" he said.

Critics contend the stimulus bill is bloated with spending for items that won't create jobs, such as smoking prevention programs or efforts to combat a future pandemic flu outbreak.

And while polls show Obama is popular and the public supports recovery legislation, Republicans have maneuvered in the past several days to identify and ridicule relatively small items in the bill.

One minor victory for Obama came Wednesday night when the Senate softened — but would not remove — a "Buy American" protectionist measure that drew strong criticism from major US trading partners including Japan, Australia and Canada.

The bill sent to the Senate by the House demanded that only US-made iron and steel be used in infrastructure projects finance by the stimulus bill. The Senate added to the edict all manufactured products used in such projects.

Initial jobless claims rose to 626,000, a 26-year high, the Labor Department said. And the number of claims by people continuing to apply for unemployment benefits reached a new record of nearly 4.8 million.

Obama has already tapped Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman and a top Obama adviser, as the leader of his high-profile panel of advisers. Members will include among others former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson, TIAA-CREF President-CEO Roger Ferguson and Harvard University professor Martin Feldstein, who wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece last year titled John McCain Has a Tax Plan To Create Jobs.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other top officials, meanwhile, are putting the finishing touches on a plan to overhaul the government's separate $700 billion rescue program for the financial sector.

A Treasury official said Geithner will deliver a speech on Monday outlining the new plan.