US PRESIDENT Barack Obama has welcomed the Senate’s approval of an $838 billion economic stimulus package but warned of tough negotiations ahead as the Senate Bill is reconciled with a similar measure passed by the House of Representatives.
The Senate approved the Bill yesterday by 61-37, with just three Republicans joining Democratic senators to support it.
“That’s good news,” Mr Obama told a town hall meeting in Florida. “And I want to thank all the members of the Senate who moved the process forward. We’ve still got to get the House Bill and the Senate Bill to match up before it gets sent to my desk, so we’ve got a little more work to do over the next couple of days, but it’s a good start.”
The president took his campaign for the economic stimulus plan outside Washington for the second successive day, visiting Fort Myers, a city with one of the highest rates of home foreclosures in the United States. On Monday, Mr Obama addressed a town hall meeting in Indiana before making the case for the stimulus Bill at his first White House press conference.
“The situation we face could not be more serious. We have inherited an economic crisis as deep and as dire as any since the Great Depression,” the president said yesterday.
“Economists from across the spectrum have warned that if we don’t act immediately millions more jobs will disappear and national unemployment rates will approach double digits. More people will lose their homes and their health care. And our nation will sink into a crisis that, at some point, will be much tougher to reverse.”
Mr Obama linked his own political future to economic recovery, suggesting that, if his plan fails, he will lose office in 2012.
“I expect to be judged by results,” he said. “You know, I’m not going to make any excuses. If stuff hasn’t worked and people don’t feel like I’ve led the country in the right direction, then you’ll have a new president.”
Mr Obama came face-to-face with the human consequences of the economic downturn when Henrietta Hughes (61) told him during the town hall meeting that she and her son had been homeless for more than a year and were living in a pickup truck. The president walked over to Mrs Hughes and hugged her, telling her that he would ask his staff to see what help they could offer.
Talking to reporters on board Air Force One as he left Washington yesterday, Mr Obama said that the American public did not need to be convinced of the need for an economic stimulus package but that he wanted to use the town hall meetings to send a message to Congress.
“We just wanted to shine a spotlight on how severe this downturn is all across the country, and to make sure that members of Congress understand the sense of urgency that I feel in getting something done,” he said.
Over the next few days, Mr Obama and House Democrats will seek to restore almost $100 billion in funding for school reconstruction and help for state governments that was stripped from the Senate Bill to win the support of conservative Democratic senators and three moderate Republicans.
The Republican senators who supported the stimulus Bill – Maine’s Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter – have promised to fight hard to preserve the cuts.
Yesterday’s Senate vote came as treasury secretary Timothy Geithner announced a sweeping overhaul of the government’s effort to rescue the banking system, promising to generate up to $2 trillion in public and private money to absorb toxic assets and get credit moving again.