WASHINGTON (AFP) – After a failed "charm offensive," US President Barack Obama and his allies unleashed a hard-hitting campaign Thursday to break defiant Republicans' thus-far united opposition to his economic stimulus plan.
The strategy called for millions of labor union members to telephone Republicans from hard-hit states, coupled with an aggressive television advertising campaign targeting potentially vulnerable Republican senators.
The ad featured Obama's warnings about the economic crisis he inherited from George W. Bush and invited viewers in Maine, New Hampshire, Alaska, and Iowa to tell their senators "support the Obama plan for jobs not the failed policies of the past," according to the script.
And the White House did not deny a report by Politico.com that it planned a state-by-state effort, highlighting job losses, to pressure lawmakers on the stimulus plan.
The aggressive tactics came after Obama's week-long charm offensive failed to win over even a single Republican when the House of Representatives voted 244-188 to pass the 819-billion-dollar measure.
Obama invited leaders from both parties and both chambers to the White House on Friday, held private talks with Senate and House Republicans on Tuesday, and invited lawmakers over for cocktails late Wednesday after the vote.
Obama is "disappointed" but "knows it's going to take longer than a few days to change the way Washington works," spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a round of US television network interviews. "His hand will continue to be extended."
Obama said in a statement after Wednesday's vote that the bill was sound but that he was prepared to embrace changes as it winds its way through the Senate -- where Republican minority has more clout to stall or alter the measure.
"Obama's doing very, very well on that. He can say he's been going the extra distance, he's been listening to what they have to say," said Eric Davis, an expert on presidential politics at Middlebury College in Vermont.
The White House has signalled that it expects the Senate to approve more Republican-friendly items, leading to a House-Senate "conference" to produce a compromise bill that would be more likely to win Republican support.
Some Democrats argue privately that the Republicans are sticking by their natural tax-cut leanings while figuring cynically that the party gains nothing from supporting a Democratic measure whether it succeeds or fails and are best off if they oppose a bill that fails to revive the economy.
"That's not likely," said Davis, because "we won't know until later this year, early next year, what the big economic numbers are. And if the economic numbers get better, I don't think it'll have as much to do with this bill as other steps to help banks, maybe automakers."
House Republicans, who point out that 11 Democrats voted against the plan, says their ideas are better and recently carried out public opinion polling that found tax cuts edge out spending as a preferred stimulus mechanism.
Lawmakers "will have no trouble returning home and explaining to struggling families that they voted against a bill that would recklessly spend billions upon billions of dollars on non-stimulative and non-emergency government programs," said Republican Whip Eric Cantor's spokesman, Brad Dayspring.
But Republican senators, accusing their Democratic colleagues of ignoring Obama's appeal for bipartisanship, lined up at a press briefing to deny they were seeking to extract political capital.
"As an American I want to see the right thing done regardless of who gets the credit," Senator Bob Bennett of Utah said. "I'm going to vote against this package because it won't work."
Overall, however, Obama and the stimulus plan are popular with the US public, and Republicans have to worry about "whether in three months they want to be known only as 'the party of no,'" said Davis.
Bipartisanship?
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