Obama struggles with task of fixing economy

To get a quick fix, he would need a big initiative, but the president stands almost no chance of getting Congress to pass any substantial legislation in the few weeks left before the mid-term elections — a stretch of time he calls the campaign “silly season.”

Even if he could, it would be too late to help his Democratic party before Election Day on Nov. 2.

“Between now and the time the Congress packs up for good to spend full-time on the fall campaign, the chances are between slim and none that any new significant economic legislation will pass,” said William Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and now a scholar at the Brookings Institution think-tank.

Obama returned on Sunday from a vacation to confront a batch of grim economic data and rising frustrations among Americans about the scarcity of jobs.

His week is jam-packed with foreign policy events, and he has scrambled to tell voters that the economy is his top concern.

Obama and his aides are discussing new measures they want to roll out quickly but the White House has suggested these will be “targeted” rather than a bold new package.

So that leaves the presidential bully pulpit as the main tool Obama must rely on to both convince voters and inspire confidence among businesses, consumers and investors.

But critics accuse him of fumbling that effort.

“This is a president who has lost control of his public message. It wanders unleashed from park to alley, stopping to sniff every cable news story along the way,” Michael Gerson, a former speech writer for President George W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post on Wednesday.

Gerson said that instead of focusing on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” the White House has allowed the conversation to drift to subjects like immigration and a planned mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York.

Big Jobs Report Looms

Crucial for Obama will be Friday's monthly jobs report. Private economists forecast it will show that employers slashed 100,000 jobs from their payrolls and that the unemployment rate ticked higher to 9.6 percent in August from 9.5 percent in July.

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