Pushing the calendar, and maybe his luck, President-elect Barack Obama is urging rapid approval of a massive economic stimulus package meant to calm turbulent financial markets.
He will not be president for another eight weeks, and the politically safer route might be to lie low as President George W. Bush finishes his rocky term. But in announcing his economic team Monday at a White House-style news conference, Obama has chosen to use the aura of the presidency even before he assumes the office, gambling that he can soften the economy’s fall as he continues to fill out the rest of his Cabinet.
“The truth is, we do not have a minute to waste. These extraordinary stresses on our financial system require extraordinary policy responses,” Obama said before he introduced New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy Geithner as his treasury secretary and Lawrence Summers, a former treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, to lead the National Economic Council.
Obama has said repeatedly there can be only one president at a time and has kept a relatively low public profile as Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have tried to deal with the mortgage and credit crisis that threaten a deep global recession.
That changed at his news conference Monday, when the president-elect pressed for passage of a multibillion-dollar stimulus plan aimed at creating jobs, easing the home foreclosure crisis and rescuing the struggling auto industry.
Doug Astolfi, a presidential historian at Florida’s St. Leo University, said that because of the recent stock market plunge Obama had little choice but to step forward. “Had he not gotten involved, the potential for really disastrous shifts in the economy were all there,” Astolfi said, adding that until his inauguration Obama is still insulated from blame if things get worse. “He can key in a team and push for policies. But if bad things happen, he’s protected from most criticism because it’s the fault of the people who are still there,” Astolfi said.
By stepping out so forcefully, Obama signaled he was not following the example of another Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932, during another period of economic calamity. Roosevelt refused to cooperate during the transition with his vanquished predecessor, Republican Herbert Hoover, waiting instead to tackle the crisis after he was sworn in as president.
