Is Obama Message on Economy Breaking Through?

By RICK KLEIN On Thursday, we’re told, the White House focus is on the economy. This is no time to coddle fat cats. Wall Street can’t get richer while Main Street suffers. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. Really, of course, the only big story is Haiti — but leave some room for health care, and Afghanistan, and that special election up in Massachusetts that wasn’t supposed to be interesting until suddenly it was. (Even if C-SPAN could get in the room — would they take the health care negotiations live, with so much else going on? OK, C-SPAN might, but they might be alone.) This has been a recurring problem for a White House that’s flooded every zone, and been flooded out of more than a few comfort zones: When it’s time to focus on something, there’s no guarantees of anyone’s focus. Regarding Thursday’s announcements, how many times has President Obama said he’s getting tough with the bankers already? And are people convinced they’re even the problem here — given that they paid TARP funds back? For an issue — the economy — that continues to dominate the political landscape, the White House’s struggle has been to connect action in Washington to public concerns. Thursday’s announcement — after President Obama goes to cameras again to discuss the response to the tragedy in Haiti, at 10 am ET — adds a new phrase to the lexicon. Meet the “financial crisis responsibility fee,” four words designed to avoid three letters.
 
“The plan marks the latest in a slew of proposed fees, penalties and constraints the White House envisions slapping on Wall Street during the clean-up of the financial crisis,” The Wall Street Journal’s Damian Paletta, Deborah Solomon and David Enrich report. “If approved by Congress, the new tax — which the White House calls a ‘financial crisis responsibility fee’ — would force more than 25 banks to collectively pay the federal government roughly $100 billion over 10 years. … The administration hasn't disclosed the exact equation it will use to determine what each bank owes, but the rough contours suggest that J.P. Morgan, Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. will top the list of banks with the largest exposure.” “The move may have a bigger political than fiscal impact. By including it in the budget message that he will send to Congress next month, the president is tapping into public anger over the bailouts of the financial and auto industries, executive bonuses as well as the deficit,” Bloomberg’s Julianna Goldman and Ryan J. Donmoyer report. “Obama and the Democratic Party are seeking to limit voter discontent before the November congressional elections.” Rebutting an early argument: “When asked how the administration will make sure that fees are not passed on to customers, the senior administration official said that these financial institutions have a ‘competitive incentive’ to not do that because it is not a fee on the entire financial industry,”per ABC’s Karen Travers and Sunlen Miller, who have details of how the fee would be imposed. Another day of hearings on the financial crisis Thursday — and check out ABC’s Jonathan Karl chasing down bank CEOs on the Hill Wednesday. Good for a new vision? “If you want to understand why President Obama's standing in the polls is not where it used to be — and also why the populist-sounding Tea Party movement has gained so much traction — consider that some significant part of the American voting population has come to see the administration as both too liberal and too tied to Wall Street,” E.J. Dionne Jr. writes in his column. “Obama is finally trying to address what has been an enormous distortion in our political debate,” he continues. “Will the Tea Party crowd come out against taxes on banks and finance in the name of their libertarian principles? If they do, what kind of populists are they? After a year in which progressives played defense, it's time to call some bluffs.” A larger purpose? The new fee is “intended to constrain risk-taking and discourage outsize bonuses, in addition to recouping some of the cost of the government's various bailout programs,” Binyamin Appelbaum reports in The Washington Post. “The administration plans to include the proposed tax in the budget it delivers to Congress in February. What emerges from Congress, however, could be markedly different. Some members of both chambers already are calling for a more punitive tax.” The larger worry: “One year after President Obama took office, the green shoots of optimism that accompanied his inauguration are withering, pummeled by gale-force discontent and anxiety over the prolonged recession, a new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll indicates,” Ron Brownstein writes in a take-out in the new National Journal. “And although most people still believe that Obama’s agenda will eventually benefit the country, his approval rating has fallen to 47 percent amid a widespread consensus that Washington’s response to the downturn has so far helped the wealthy and powerful more than it has average families.” The response to the unimaginable crisis in Haiti continues to dominate. On casualties: “I don’t want to hazard a guess,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” Thursday. “It’s devastated… Thankfully, the people of Haiti are a resilient people…. We have seen this cycle of hope and despair so many times.” Meanwhile — is health care actually getting done? The doors are closed, the cameras are on the outside, and progress is being reported. Make that “significant progress,” according to the joint statement out of the White House and Democratic congressional leaders (and they’re all Democrats in the room, naturally) after a morning meeting stretched into the early evening, with breaks for House votes and the president himself ducking in and out to handle Haiti business. More meetings come Thursday, with the president visiting the Democrats’ retreat on Capitol Hill at 5 pm ET. “President Barack Obama tried to stem the tide of intraparty unrest Wednesday by insisting that House and Senate leaders huddle at the White House until they had reached agreements on key issues,” Roll Call’s Emily Pierce and Steven T. Dennis report. “Democratic aides said the primary sticking points going into the meeting were whether to tax high-cost, or ‘Cadillac,’ insurance plans, how to deal with abortion language and whether to create a national, as opposed to state-based, insurance exchange.” The final work-around? “Union officials familiar with the negotiations said the White House would like a deal on the high-cost insurance plan tax by Friday,” the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar writes. “Options being considered to lessen the impact on union members included raising the threshold at which the tax would be levied — it's $23,000 for family plans in the Senate-passed bill — and exempting collective bargaining agreements negotiated before 2013 from the tax.” A NEW funding idea? Really? Now? “Democratic congressional leaders are considering a new strategy to help finance their ambitious healthcare plan — applying the Medicare payroll tax not just to wages but to capital gains, dividends and other forms of unearned income,” the Los Angeles Times’ Janet Hook and Noam M. Levey write. “The idea, discussed Wednesday in a marathon meeting at the White House, could placate labor leaders who bitterly oppose President Obama's plan to tax high-end insurance policies that cover many union members. … But the concept also carries political risks: Many older Americans, one of the nation's most potent voting blocs, could see their tax bills rise because they often depend on savings and investment income in retirement.” Maybe not so fast: “An aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said the goal is to submit a compromise package to congressional budget analysts for a final cost estimate by early next week,” Lori Montgomery writes in The Washington Post. “Calculating the dollar amount is likely to take at least another week, however, and senior Democrats said a final bill is unlikely to hit Obama's desk before early February, a timetable that would complicate the president's goal of touting a health-care deal in his State of the Union speech.” It all gets Karl Rove into the secrecy game: “This bill is not only being written in secrecy, it is being written by an anonymous group of Democrats. We can therefore throw Mr. Obama's commitment to bipartisanship onto his mountain of broken promises,” Rove writes in his Wall Street Journal column. “Instead, he's practicing hardball politics, aiming for a health-care bill that gets just enough Democrats to jam it through Congress with lighting speed before the American people's justified anger gets even hotter than it already is.” Nothing like a close race in a place there shouldn’t be one to instill a sense of urgency. In Massachusetts, Democrats get what they wanted, and Republicans get what they thought they wanted: a national race. (Until or unless Massachusetts grows more people who’ll vote Republican, national fervor that drives up turnout means an edge for the state that has voters to actually turn out.) “Massachusetts has become ground zero in the struggle over a national health care overhaul pending in Congress, and groups on both sides of the issue have emerged to blast mostly negative ads at the relatively small electorate that will decide the election Tuesday,” Brian C. Mooney writes in The Boston Globe. “Total spending on advertising in the final nine days by the major-party candidates, Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Scott Brown, and their allies could approach $3 million, which is an astounding figure for a Bay State election.” Vicki Kennedy’s fund-raising appeal brought Coakley more than $520,000 yesterday — maybe approaching money-bomb territory, and servers crashed after Senators Reid, Franken, Leahy, and Brown sent simultaneously sent appeals to their e-mail lists. On Thursday, Ted Kennedy Jr. with author the financial appeal. Friends like these… will get you in press releases sent around by Democrats: “As the Massachusetts Senate special election wraps up, a couple of unsavory right-wing groups are coming to Republican candidate Scott Brown's aid — underscoring just how conservative the GOP nominee who's suddenly causing Bay State Democrats to panic really is,” Salon.com’s Mike Madden writes. What happens when your candidacy gets taken seriously: “I don’t know what’s worse: that Scott Brown tried to weaken a law guaranteeing emergency contraception to rape victims, or that he now claims he can’t remember doing it. Or maybe it’s that, now that he’s running for US Senate, he’s dragging his daughters into the controversy to protect himself,” Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham writes. The Globe goes Coakley — and wants Democrats fired up: “A lot of people want to send a message. The message they should send is this: Massachusetts is fed up with Senate wrangling and wants clear answers on health care, climate change, and loose regulation of financial institutions.” Prediction times — with a number: “I see 45 seats right today; we have more than 82 recruits in the top” tier of candidates, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who’s headed up House GOP candidate recruitment, said in predicting a Republican takeover on ABC’s “Top Line” Wednesday. Contractually speaking: “Republicans really do think it could be 1994 all over again,” Carl Hulse writes in The New York Times. “Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, told his party rank-and-file on Wednesday that House Republicans would assemble a 2010 campaign document akin to the famous Contract with America embraced by Republicans in their takeover of the House in 1994.” Politico’s Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin seek out Harold Ford’s New York: “His political weakness, in short, isn’t that he’s not from New York. It’s that he’s spent the time since he lost a race for Senate and took a high-paid job with Merrill Lynch living a gilded Manhattan life available to only a few,” they write. “The real marvel, according to some who know him, was his ability to relate to Memphis, his Deep South hometown, rather than his fluency and comfort with a certain privileged New York world.” Ford comes out of the gate against the president’s health care bill and for the Wall Street bailouts — and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., chooses to fire back: “His record of being anti-choice, anti-marriage equality, and now opposed to President Obama’s health care legislation may be right for Tennessee, but I don’t believe New Yorkers will stand for a senator that says they will oppose President Obama, just like the insurance companies want,” Gillibrand said in a statement late Wednesday. “The return salvo by Gillibrand – who was appointed by Gov. Paterson last year to fill Hillary Clinton's seat – was the first time she has engaged any of her would-be challengers,” Michael Saul and David Saltonstall write in the New York Daily News.
The Kicker: “All of them.” — Sarah Palin, asked Wednesday by Glenn Beck who her favorite Founding Father was. “All of them, any of them.” — Palin, asked in 2008 by Katie Couric which newspapers she reads. For up-to-the-minute political updates check out The Note’s blog . . . all day every day:

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