by Jules Witcover

President Obama took the occasion of the first anniversary of passage of his economic recovery stimulus package to proclaim its success. But with unemployment still hovering around 10 percent, it has been a very hard sell.

Republicans in Congress generally and the tea party movement in particular have been working overtime insisting that there has been no recovery, and that the original $787 billion spending initiative has amounted to throwing money away.

The Democrats in reply have labeled the Republicans the Party of No, pointing to only a handful of GOP votes for any major Obama legislation and to their effective use of the filibuster threat in the Senate to block even minor bills that might speed the recovery.

Nevertheless, despite impressive economic reports of progress other than in the weak jobless rate, the Republican message seems to be winning the public debate. The president's own favorability has fallen sharply since those euphoric days of his inauguration only 13 months ago.

The loss of the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts, depriving Obama of the 60th Senate vote to overcome filibuster threats, has been widely interpreted as the beginning of end of the Obama presidency, pointing to a Republican resurgence in the November midterm elections.

All this is taking place in the absence of any new and credible Republican leadership, or any substantial GOP legislative agenda to cope with the lingering economic morass that predated the Obama presidency. The annual Conservative Political Action Committee conference last week featured former Massachusetts Gov. and onetime moderate Mitt Romney putting in his claim for that leadership and joining its chorus questioning recovery.

Even without a consensus leader, however, the Republicans have been able to keep Obama on the defensive by rejecting his overtures for bipartisanship, mocking his 2008 campaign pledge to "change Washington" from its partisan ways that have stalemated Congress for nearly a decade.

For all of Obama's vaunted communications skills, polls indicate he has failed to convince the public his recovery efforts are taking hold. One obvious problem is lack of public appreciation and acceptance, despite all said and written, of how close the country came to economic disaster in the 2008 collapse on Wall Street.

Because of that close call, much repair work was required just to reach the point where positive signs of recovery could begin to emerge, even as unemployment rose and hit Main Street hard. Belatedly, both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have stepped up their sales pitches on the stimulus package, citing statistical progress in manufacturing, infrastructure repair and job creation.

Obama has noted that the nation's economic health, after falling 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009, is now growing by 6 percent. And he has reminded working-class Americans that 95 percent of them got a $250 tax cut in the stimulus package, along with tax cuts for small businesses and first-time home buyers.

In his anniversary statement, the president described the package as one-third tax-cutting, one-third relief to the jobless, teachers, police, firemen and others serving public needs, and one-third for infrastructure and other economy-rebuilding projects -- all Main-Street-friendly efforts.

At the same time, Obama gave a nod to the private sector, observing that "businesses are the engines of job creation in this country." But when they "pull back and people stop spending," he said, "what government can do is provide a temporary boost that puts money in people's pockets and keeps workers on the job."

This last is a counter to the wails of creeping "socialism" increasingly leveled at him and the Democrats by the tea-party protesters who are putting backbone into the Republican opposition. What both Obama and Biden are pleading for now is time for the $500 billion already funded for 55,000 projects, and for the remaining nearly $300 billion yet unallocated, to produce the results sought.

But an impatient American public needs to hear about -- and see -- more tangible evidence of progress, especially in jobs created on Main Street, if Obama and Co. are to prevail against the naysayers aggressively sowing doubt about the huge taxpayer cost to achieve real and lasting recovery.

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Selling and Debunking Economic Recovery | Jules Witcover