In his first prime-time news conference, President Obama played defense last night over the massive $800-billion-plus stimulus plan he’s pushing Congress to pass, insisting there’s no pork and unnecessary spending, despite swelling criticism.
“When people suggest that, ‘What a waste of money to make federal buildings more energy-efficient,’ why would that be a waste of money?” Obama defiantly insisted in the 59-minute White House press conference.
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“We’re creating jobs immediately by retrofitting these buildings or weatherizing 2 million Americans’ homes, as was called for in the package, so that right there creates economic stimulus.”
Critics have ripped the stimulus plan for including billions of dollars the federal government is spending on itself.
For instance, The Post recently highlighted a $34 million refurbishment for the Commerce Department, which some lawmakers said was non-essential.
Obama also claimed last night that there’s “not a single pet project, not a single earmark . . . despite all of this, the plan’s not perfect. No plan is.”
While Obama insists the plan is pork-free, an Associated Press “fact check” analysis noted, “There are no ‘earmarks,’ as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill. Still, some of the projects bear the prime characteristics of pork – tailored to benefit specific interests or to have thinly disguised links to local projects.”
Obama opened the news conference with a nearly 10-minute statement expressing urgency over the state of the nation’s economy and saying there is little time to waste in passing a stimulus bill.
The event capped a day where Obama traveled to the job-bleeding American heartland and back to Washington to try to blunt criticism of the plan, led mostly by congressional Republicans, which has hampered public support for a package he insists is required to jump-start the gasping economy.
He claimed last night he expected the stimulus bill to create up to 4 million jobs – and he put the fault for the current crisis squarely on the shoulders of his predecessor, President Bush.
He rejected “this notion that somehow I came in here just ginned up to spend $800 billion . . . That wasn’t how I envisioned my presidency beginning. But we have to adapt to existing circumstances.”
“This is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill recession,” he said, insisting that the private sector has been so sapped by a crisis created initially by Wall Street that the government is the only entity solvent enough to “jolt” America’s economy back to life.
Some criticism of the plan has compared the Obama stimulus package to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, since both represent a similar percentage of the Gross Domestic Product. The Obama package is roughly 1.3 times the cost of the Iraq war so far.
But Obama has bristled at such comparisons, and last night said, “What I’ve been concerned about is some of the language that’s been used suggesting that this is full of pork and this is wasteful government spending, so on and so forth.”
He insisted Republicans were, in fact, consulted on the bill’s construction and said, “When I hear that from folks who presided over a doubling of the national debt, then, you know, I just want them to not engage in some revisionist history.”
Tackling a few other topics in his press conference, Obama also said he would:
* Look for windows in the coming months to meet with Iran, “start sitting-across-the-table, face-to-face diplomatic overtures that will allow us to move our policy in a new direction.”
* Want to ensure that Pakistan is a “stalwart ally” in rooting out terrorists hiding along its borders.
* Seek “more effective coordination” of military and diplomatic efforts in the war in Afghanistan.
* Be more interested in looking “forward” than backward on the issue of retroactively probing alleged misdeeds by the Bush White House.
Earlier in the day, Obama took his case for the economic stimulus plan to Indiana, making a campaign-style appearance in economically depressed Elkhart – and slamming his own party for delivering a flawed bill.
Obama conceded that the plan is less than perfect and joked it was a product of where it came from.
“It’s coming out of Washington. It’s going through Congress,” Obama said, not mentioning that his party controls both the House and Senate.
Obama will travel today to Florida, and Virginia and Illinois later in the week, to sell the stimulus plan.