Managing Government Responsibly

“Obama’s challenge: Showing how a big deficit reduction deal creates desperately needed jobs

By Associated Press, Published: July 9

WASHINGTON — Immersed in an intense struggle to cut the national debt, President Barack Obama faces a dilemma that will stay with him even if he succeeds in striking a grand deal with Congress: convincing Americans that the entire effort will do anything to create desperately needed jobs.

Obama ties deficit reduction to jobs, on the basis that trying to balance the nation’s books will promote economic stability and give businesses more confidence to hire. But that’s a tough sell to the millions of Americans out of work right now. And the communications problem just got harder.

The latest snapshot of the economy, out Friday, was a body blow that showed employers added a meager 18,000 jobs in June. The leaders of the country, meanwhile, are consumed with negotiating a major debt-reduction deal built upon cutting spending and raising taxes. It is not directly aimed at boosting jobs.

Obama’s challenge is to link all this in meaningful terms and to get faster results. At stake are the country’s economic recovery and his re-election chances.

The debt is the urgent problem for Obama and a divided Congress because they have no choice. Reaching a deal has become the key to winning Republican support for raising the nation’s debt limit, a politically noxious vote that Congress must take by Aug. 2 to keep the nation from risking default for the first time ever.

“There’s no question that this is a complex, almost impenetrable issue,” said David Axelrod, a longtime Obama adviser and now a senior strategist to the president’s re-election campaign. “It’s not just the issue of the potential default, but it’s the larger issue of what he’s trying to get at, the opportunity of trying to do something big about the deficits and the debt. Big things are at stake, but they’re hard to penetrate, so the process of dealing with them is painstaking.”

Republicans, too, face the challenge of explaining and defending how cutting debt will create jobs in the short term. They won control of the House last year in large part because of voter anxiety about government spending and jobs. But it is Obama who bears the largest burden, as any president does.

In addressing the dismal jobs report, Obama made plain he knows what the country is thinking.

“The debate here in Washington’s been dominated by issues of debt limit,” Obama said. “But what matters most to Americans, and what matters to me most as president in the wake of the worst downturn in our lifetimes, is getting our economy on a sounder footing so the American people can have the security they deserve.”

As an imperative unto itself, deficit reduction is embraced by all parties as vital for stabilizing the nation and shrinking the debt passed on to the next generations. And a failure to extend the nation’s borrowing limit could cause a kind of enormous economic breakdown that would only worsen the employment picture.

Now under deadline pressure, Obama and congressional leaders of both parties were to hold a rare weekend negotiation session on Sunday on a debt-cutting package that remains far from certain.”