Obama employs multiple bottom lines

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama did not have just one bottom line at his first news conference on Monday night. He had eight of them.

Obama pounded away at the grim state of the U.S. economy and at critics of an economic stimulus plan in the big event in the White House East Room, where George and Martha Washington watched from portraits across the room.

Showing his professorial side, Obama used the first 15 minutes of the hourlong session to deliver his opening statement and answer the first question.

He sprinkled the words "bottom line" throughout the news conference, using several to stress his drive to save or create 4 million jobs and to keep Congress from blocking the stimulus, and moving on to stopping al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

"So my bottom line when it comes to the recovery package is: Send me a bill that creates or saves 4 million jobs," he said.

The news was all grim out there and Obama reflected the prevailing national mood. Jobs are being shed at an alarming rate, people cannot pay bills, the economy is in a "full-blown crisis," he said, and that was just from his opening statement.

Could it be, he was asked, that he was perhaps talking down the economy by using such dire language? "No, no, no, no," he replied. "This is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill recession. We are going through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."

Only joe knows for sure

The only light moment came when he was asked what Vice President Joe Biden was talking about when Biden last week described an Oval Office conversation he had with Obama. Biden had said, "If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there's still a 30 percent chance we're going to get it wrong."

Obama, with a smile, declared himself stumped. "You know, I don't remember exactly what Joe was referring to ... not surprisingly," he said.

Democrat Obama made clear he was still smarting from Republican attacks on some of the spending items in the $800 billion stimulus plan that they consider wasteful.

He was at his most animated when attacking their credibility on spending, stressing more than once that he inherited a bad situation from his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.

"When it comes to how we approach the issue of fiscal responsibility, again, it's a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package after they've presided over a doubling of the national debt," he said.

Could politics be at work here? Obama seemed to think so. "You know, there's a lot of jockeying in this town, and a lot of 'who's up and who's down,' and positioning for the next election," he said.