Running for re-election, he’s getting beaten up from the political left for making too many concessions and for abandoning the positions on which he campaigned. And he’s being attacked from the right by Republican conservatives who claim his spending and taxing policies are hampering the economic recovery.
Over the past days, Obama has been confronted with humiliating blows on both the economy and in Afghanistan, while polls show deteriorating public support for both him and Congress amid growing public disillusionment with the nation’s policymaking process.
Usually, August is a steamy, lazy time in the nation’s capital when not much gets done and when both Congress and usually the president go on vacation.
But so far this month, the government avoided — just narrowly — a first-ever default on its financial obligations as it came just hours within beginning to run out of cash to pay its bills. A last-minute compromise with Republicans helped avoid the default but wasn’t enough to keep the government’s credit rating from being downgraded one notch from AAA to AA-plus by Standard & Poor’s.
But Obama did not spell out any new initiatives beyond renewing his call for Congress to extend a payroll tax cut, advance trade pacts with South Korea, Panama and Colombia, and deliver patent reform.
The president has few tools left to stoke growth. Fiscal stimulus efforts during the 2008-2009 recession, including a multibillion-dollar auto industry bailout, have vastly expanded the budget deficit. Now the United States is under market pressure to slash it or face higher funding costs.
Republicans on Capitol Hill -- and on the presidential campaign trail -- strongly oppose big, new spending programs and are giving the White House little wiggle room to boost hiring through public works programs or business incentives.
"There are some folks in Congress who would rather see their opponents lose than see America win," Obama told an audience at a battery facility in Michigan, a car-producing state that was hard hit by the recession and which he hopes to win again in the 2012 election.
Critics complain the president has failed to assure Americans during one of the worst weeks in the stock market since he took office amid the financial crisis in January 2009.
But the president remains more popular than Congress, whose approval rating slumped after a toxic debate to lift the U.S. debt ceiling prompted a downgrade of the nation's AAA credit rating by Standard & Poor's and an ensuing stock market rout.
Markets have whipsawed this week. U.S. stocks shot up 4 percent on Thursday.
Obama blamed the violent market gyrations on forces beyond his control, noting European financial turmoil was "lapping up" on U.S. shores, while the credit rating downgrade had been a "self-inflicted wound".
"This downgrade you've been reading about could have been entirely avoided if there had been a willingness to compromise in Congress," the president said.
The downgrade came after lawmakers failed to agree on sufficiently large cuts in the country's deficit during negotiations to lift the $14.3 trillion U.S. debt ceiling.
Fiscally conservative Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives rejected tax hikes, undermining a grand bargain between Obama and Republican leaders that could have lowered the deficit by up to $4 trillion over 10 years.
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