What mandate for change?

Barack Obama is already facing pushback from Congress about his economic stimulus plan. But it's coming from Democrats.

By Mike Madden

The hard sell that Barack Obama put on last week went beyond the normal political smooth-talking that presidents (or presidents-elect) sometimes use to promote their legislative agenda and crossed over into something a bit more urgent.

"For the sake of our economy and our people, this is the moment to act and to act without delay," Obama said Friday, pushing Congress -- for the second day in a row -- to get moving on a massive $775 billion economic stimulus plan as soon as possible. (On Thursday, he'd devoted an entire speech to the plan, the first time he'd given what his staff had billed as a "major policy address" since he won the election.) "The American people are struggling. And behind the statistics that we see flashing on the screens are real lives, real suffering, real fears. And it is my job to make sure that Congress stays focused in the weeks to come and gets this done." His Saturday radio/YouTube address had more of the same; the transition team simultaneously released a 14-page report claiming Obama's plan would create 3 to 4 million jobs by the end of next year.

 

But the main target of his blitz isn't necessarily voters, who polls show are on board with just about anything that will help save jobs. And it isn't the Republican opposition in Congress; they may not go along with the plan in the end, but Democrats have big enough margins in both the House and the Senate that they shouldn't need too many GOP votes to pass Obama's plan. As it turns out, that's the problem: Democrats, who with their expanded majorities were supposed to make it easy for Obama's agenda to cruise through Congress, started objecting to the stimulus plan as soon as details leaked to the press.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/01/12/stimulus/