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Obama to detail economic vision

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-01-05 21:46

Barack Obama will lay out his vision for a massive economic stimulus plan in meetings with congressional leaders Monday. Perhaps more important, he'll be taking a major step toward rebuilding the broken relationship between the executive branch and the legislative branch.

US President-elect Barack Obama walks down the steps of an Air Force jet January 4 at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland. [Agecnies]

Doing so will be critical to the success of his agenda.

If Obama seems unwilling to take lawmakers' ideas into account, he could risk whatever goodwill he's getting from the GOP and irk Democrats expecting to play a big role in a new Washington. But if Obama bends to the demands of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, the public could perceive him as a weak president even before he takes the oath of office.

McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said on ABC's "This Week" Sunday that Republicans just want to be "a part of the process." Obama has signaled that he wants them to be a part of the process, too. While Democrats often complained that President Bush left them in the cold - lining up just enough votes to pass whatever he wanted - Obama's strategists have indicated that he wants not 51 or 60 but at least 80 Senate votes for his stimulus plan.

To get there, the president-elect's stimulus plan will put nearly as much emphasis on tax cuts as on new spending. As Politico reported Sunday night, 40 percent of the plan's price tag will come from tax breaks that could help woo GOP support. Obama and his vice-president-elect, Joseph Biden, have said that they'll keep earmarks out of the package - another bone for Republicans - and Hill Democrats say they may slow consideration of the package to assuage Republicans who have been complaining in advance about heavy-handed tactics.

"Whatever we do must be done on a bipartisan basis," Reid, the Senate majority leader, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

Obama takes office at a critical moment in the country's economic history but also at a critical juncture in the relationship between Congress and the White House. Bush and his predecessor, Bill Clinton, were both former governors accustomed to exerting their wills over state legislatures, and that translated into frosty relationships with Congress.

A standoff between Clinton and House Republicans led to a government shut-down in 1995, and the House voted to impeach Clinton in 1998. Bush and the Democrats in Congress were often at war over the Iraq war and other issues. And over the last few months, even Republicans have abandoned the president on economic issues, resisting his administration's pleas for a $700 billion financial-markets bailout and rejecting his plan for a $14-billion bailout of the auto industry.

Since Election Day, Obama and his senior aides have tried to heal the wounds. The president-elect has placed dozens of phone calls to key Republicans and Democrats, insisting that his administration will want Hill input as it crafts its agenda. A former senator himself, Obama picked another senator as a running mate, a third senator as his secretary of state, a fourth as his interior secretary and Rahm Emanuel - a fast-rising member of the Democratic House leadership - as his White House chief of staff.

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