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Feb 15 2009, 9:16 am by Ronald Brownstein

Obama's To Do List

Everyone has a to-do list around the house.

In an interview Friday afternoon on Air Force One en route to Chicago, President Obama shared his with a small group of columnists.

Now that Congress has approved his economic recovery plan, he was asked, what's his plan for the rest of 2009? Here's his reply:

THE PRESIDENT:  My priorities for the rest of the year.  Number one is to get the right structure for the successor to TARP; spending the $300-some billion that has already been authorised as wisely as possible, and injecting transparency and trust into the financial system.  Having a housing program that provides relief to people who are at risk of losing their homes.  Financial regulations that ensure that the crisis doesn't happen again.  A innovative and aggressive push for health care reform that focuses not just on access but also on costs, and trying to just provide relief to working families.  And a push for an energy policy that puts us on a path to sustainability. 

You asked given what we inherited, are we going to be able to get all this done.  Some of these reforms don't cost money.  They will still be heavy political lifts because there are philosophical arguments about how to approach it.  Some of these problems are very complicated.  Health care is a classic situation where it may cost money on the front end and save enormous money on the back end and what we're going to have to figure out is what can we do now to start getting that ball rolling, because the longer we put that off, the worse off we are financially.  Medicare and Medicaid on their current trajectory cannot be sustained.  And the only way I think we're going to fix it is if we see those two problems in the broader contest of bending the curve down on health care inflation....

I should add one more thing and that is a budget process that starts bending the deficit curve down. I think that all these goals are complementary.  I also think that the American people understand we won't get everything done overnight.  The U.S. government and the U.S. economy are enormous ocean liners, they're not speedboats.  So what we will do this year is to try to get them on the right trajectory and hopefully that means at the end of my term you'll look back and you'll say we're at a different place than we would have been had we not made these changes.

Footnote: one White House aide says to look for Obama to convene his fiscal responsibility summit-an effort to build consensus for long-term deficit reduction- on the day before his economic speech to Congress on February 24. Later that week, Peter Orszag, the Office of Management and Budget director, will unveil the framework of Obama's first budget.

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Comments (2)

Greg

I think the sad thing is that it is clear that Obama is not going for a real climate change bill. I'm all healthcare reform, but we're talking about the future of our planet and the continued viability of our species as a whole.

Dean

There is so much to do - Timing seems to be everything. I just wish that President Obama and the Democrats would get aggressive in the media and create a road map to what exactly has transpired these last eight years, the current and future damage those policies are/will create and a step by step guide to what needs to be fixed and how.

I think the biggest problem is that the public doesn't understand the duress the country is in, how it got there and what needs to be done to correct it. Americans want to be part of this and want to understand what exactly got us here - we as a country are smart enough to understand and digest this. The American people want to know the honest truth and have to know the truth if they are to make the sacrifices necessary to rebuild this nation from where it stands today. Rhetoric always submits to truth.

The Democrats have failed at getting their message out because the Democrats don't know how to aggressively fight back and be proactive as a whole. Democrats always pull punches, Republicans always go for the heart. There is a need for a fair and accurate description of the saga of how we got to the point of where we are, something beyond just policy. We need the Democrat narrative.

Democrats don't say "Your 8 years of policies of benefiting the rich as the expense of the poor is the cancer that will kill the Democracy of this great country. Selling America out to a few Energy, Defense and Banking Monopolies is silent eroding the entrepreneurs into poverty and hunger" or "Bending the will of the American people with the blunt forces of fear about terrorism and personal safety is eroding the very Freedoms and Rights of the American people."


No one seems to have the balls to take on Rush & Co - No one seems to have the balls to confront the Republicans and fight as mean and hard as them. It is outwardly disgusting to see Republicans dominate the daily news cycle with not a Democrat to be found with the balls to go toe to toe and call them on 8 years of failed policy. It is sad that the Democrats aren't as proactive to get the message out as the Republican party. This is the cancer that no one is willing to speak about - it will rot the Democratic party's base with misinformation and confusion like it has done before - turning it against itself like an old record. The people really want to truth - the people can handle the truth and without the truth being heard, Democracy itself will not survive..

Before any policies can be really pursued - the American people need to understand it - once they do, everything else naturally will follow. The question is if anyone can provide that narrative - without it, every policy will be mucked in senseless debate.