President Barack Obama returns to work at the White House after eight days in Asia with his Cabinet members under fire, a decision on Afghanistan pending and an urgent mandate to tackle job creation. And that’s just a start.
Obama also has to get through his first state visit as president, honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday.
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was trumpeting the fact that his health bill cost less than $900 billion and didn’t increase the deficit.
But Reid’s self-declared victory comes at the cost of big new taxes and significant cuts to Medicare.
A Congressional Budget Office analysis shows the bill, which expands health care to 31 million people and creates a government-run insurance program, would cost $849 billion over 10 years beginning in 2010 while trimming the deficit by $130 billion over the same period.
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The White House is defending the scattershot oversight that has made its stimulus-related job creation claims a dubious and moving target.
"Transparency is going to be messy, but it's better than the alternative," Ed DeSeve, a special adviser to President Obama on the stimulus program, wrote in a White House blog post.
A series of news reports, notably by ABC News, highlighted bogus job creation claims on the administration's much-touted Recovery.gov Web site. The site tracks the $787 billion in stimulus funding approved earlier this year by Congress.
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was still hoping to complete a health care overhaul by the end of the year, but time is running out and members of the Democratic caucus say he has all but ruled out debate beginning this week.
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., told reporters that Reid promised "days -- not a day or two" for lawmakers to review the yet-to-be-seen bill before attempting to clear a 60-vote procedural hurdle needed to bring the legislation to the Senate floor.
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In studying parallels to the past and former President Clinton's tough lessons on health care reform, Democrats on Capitol Hill may risk drawing the wrong conclusions.
With Democrats looking ahead with alarm to the 2010 midterm elections, an emerging refrain of the current health care debate warns that Clinton's trouncing on the issue in 1994 led directly to the Republican takeover of Congress. But it was not that simple, political experts say.
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While health care remains the primary worry for Congress in the waning weeks of the session, lawmakers are also to pass the controversial plan and still have time to shift gears to job creation.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he plans to clear the deck after health care passes to take up a jobs creation bill. But since Reid's health care bill has yet to emerge and the Senate is little more than a month away from closing up shop for the year, it may be a tall order.
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Inside the Beltway, the military, media, and pundits are all awaiting the president's decision on the strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But for more people outside, the decision for war has already been made. Virtual war that is.
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President Obama is visiting Asia this week amid high expectations but waning influence for the United States in the region.
The 10-day trip will focus on issues of trade and currency, climate, nuclear nonproliferation and the war in Afghanistan, among other topics. Obama will stop in Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea.
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Few issues between the United States and China are as fraught as their co-dependent financial arrangements.
Holding more than $1 trillion in U.S. debt, China is America's biggest banker. But China is worried about America's ability to meet its obligations, and all of Asia is concerned about the shaky U.S. dollar.
"There are a lot of concerns here that persist in terms of the Chinese taking away our jobs and owning all of our Treasury bonds," said Bonnie Glaser, Freeman chairwoman in Chinese studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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New poll numbers show Democrats could face trouble on the ballot in 2010, particularly among independents.
A new Gallup survey reveals that for the first time since the 2008 election that more voters say they would pick a Republican candidate over a Democratic candidate. Republicans took 48 percent of voters to 44 percent for Democrats. Independent voters went for the GOP by a 22-point margin.
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