Word: hills
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Since he took office Obama has reached out to the GOP, even though the Democrats hold large majorities in both chambers of Congress. The President made an unprecedented trip to the Hill to meet with the Republican conferences, invited select GOP Senators to meet him with him in the Oval Office, at times one-on-one, and called numerous senators to convince them to come on board. In recent days, though, as the bill languished before the Senate his tone turned sharper. "The American people did not choose more of the same," Obama said at a White House meeting Friday...
...Over the course of the transition, when the bill was being drafted, top Obama aides held multiple meetings with committee staffers and their bosses, but in the end, the bill was written on the Hill. "They did a good job of really deferring to Congress," says one pleased senior Democratic aide involved in the bill's creation. (Read "How to Spend a Trillion Dollars...
...that may not have been an option. For one thing, congressional staffers may be the only people in America with the dubious skill of being able to move nearly a trillion dollars into the national economy in a hurry. And Hill staffers claim that Obama needed the leaders of the various committees to tell him what the bill required to garner enough votes to pass. Either way, the fact that the bill is the product of free-spending congressional committees is likely to hurt Obama. It is defining his first major effort to fix the economy...
...Martin Feldstein, the conservative economist who has been advising the White House as well as Hill Democrats and Republicans, was an early advocate for the stimulus but turned on the bill the House produced. He says the Senate bill, unveiled on Tuesday, is equally wasteful. "[Obama's team] turned it over to the congressional staffs," Feldstein says, and the result is that the bill spends like Congress always spends: with an eye to benefiting regional constituents. The problem, he contends, is that the bill's goal is to boost overall national spending, which is a very different thing...
...This is where Obama's next big test lies: the President may not be able to claim authorship of the bill, but an aggressive editor can change a lot. The question is whether the White House will accept the Hill's arguments for what is needed to pass the bill, effectively letting the Democratic committee leaders price the value of Obama's political capital, or whether the Administration will see for itself what the market will bear...