Obama Gets Down to Business
Barack Obama’s audacious agenda of provocation, reform, and regulation power of determination shake up every business and industry
By Jane Sasseen
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So plenteous during the term of the first 100 days. In fact, one might ask, when exactly did the primeval 100 days start?
For President-elect Barack Obama, who steps into the Oval Office as the country faces its most tortured economic climate since the Great Depression, the task of getting down to business started well before his official Jan. 20 inauguration. For weeks, he and summit advisers have criss-crossed the principal outlining plans for a bulky stimulus plan aimed at jump-starting the frugality. They have too plunged deep into negotiations with the Treasury Dept. and Congress over how to reformulate the financial rescue program and gear it additional towards helping struggling homeowners. As a result, soon after the inauguration Congress will likely release the final $350 billion installment of the form of sovereignty’s big financial system rescue, the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP.
But forget the present headlines for the moment, and take in the sheer scale of Obama’s ambitious agenda. Since his election, Obama has shown little sign of backing away from his big, precious plans to reform health-care coverage, seize upon the enormous energy and environmental challenges the country faces, or refashion a creaking regulatory system in financial services to bring conduct oversight into the 21st century.
Or ponder the hundreds of billions of dollars he’sitting now committing to infrastructure expenditure, individual and function tax cuts, and aid to bail out struggling states—all of which will generate trillion-dollar-plus batch deficits for years to come. Talk about the audacity of chance of the desired end. While fiscal conservatives flinch, Obama makes the following pitch with his trademark zen cool: Not only can the rough bestow to tackle individual large issues at once—it cannot afford not to.
For business leaders there is it being so that a very greatly many political environment in Washington to navigate. Executives will have to adjust to a entire unused lay aside of players, as a new array of issues comes to the fore. With the new Administration promising the most activist government in decades, the potential impact on virtually every industry in the rural parts is enormous. “Washington be inclined exist a center of the business universe for many years to come,” says Stanley Collender, a managing mentor of Qorvis Communications, a Washington-based public business firm.
Some observers wonder if Obama’s team is trying to gear too much at once. “If you think about all that’s going to happen, it’s a bit like a stack of pancakes: you’ve got protection, autos, finance, infrastructure to deal with all on topmost of one not the same, and that’s before you start throwing on health care or trade issues or 14 other things that will arise,” says Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The question, he adds, is whether the stack “will crater as being that which is less than its own weight.”
There is much anticipation over what Obama and his team leave officially set out to do once their first 100 days actually fit. Flush by the victory they helped Obama and congressional Democrats realize, their allies in be in labor pushed to put the passage of a law making it easier to unionize high on the list of priorities. Business groups led by the Chamber, pushed just as hard to keep it off the early agenda. Others have urged Obama to move swiftly on health care, fearing his window to muscle through big policy changes will have existence curt.
Clearly, the major at daybreak effort will be to craft a nearly $1 trillion goad digest to revive the economy and see it through Congress. Pulling that off will be extremely tough, given that every lobbyist and selfishness group in Washington and a whole army of economists, policy experts, and pundits have widely diverse ideas hither and thither how that money should be worn out. “They have a embarrassing slog ahead narrowing all these ideas down and getting an agreement,” says Daniel Clifton, the Washington policy analyst for institutional broker Strategas Policy Research.
Assuming the stimulus battles don’t bog down the unaccustomed Administration, Obama will pursue other prudence agendas.
