Obama urges Dems to focus on big problems

February 4, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — A feisty but occasionally frustrated President Barack Obama tried Wednesday to calm nervous Senate Democrats about their political futures and prospects for passing major legislation, as he urged them to keep pushing hard for solutions to the nation’s most vexing problems.

“The American people are out of patience with business as usual,” he told a Senate Democrats’ issues conference. “They’re fed up with a Washington that has become so absorbed with who’s up and who’s down that we’ve lost sight of how they’re doing.

“They want us to start worrying less about keeping our jobs and more about helping them keep their jobs.”

Obama’s 75-minute meeting was a combination pep talk and down-to-earth question-and-answer session with worried lawmakers. Congress so far this year has been far less eager to move forward to finish large 2009 initiatives such as health-care overhaul and climate- change legislation, preferring smaller, more careful steps.

The House of Representatives plans a vote next week to strip health insurers of their partial exemption from federal antitrust laws, a small piece of the health bill now stalled in Congress. Senate Democrats are expected shortly to take up Obama’s job-creation package as a series of smaller bills rather than the kind of comprehensive stimulus package it passed last year.

Obama wants the Democrats’ big legislative ambitions to stay in the forefront. First, though, he had to try to defuse tension over the meaning of Massachusetts Sen.-elect Scott Brown’s victory last month. Brown, the winner of a special election for the seat long held by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, will be sworn in probably next week. That will reduce the Democrats’ majority to 59 in the 100-member Senate. Sixty votes are needed to cut off debate.

The loss of one Senate Democratic vote should not be so jarring, Obama said. “All that’s changed in the last few weeks is our party has gone from having the largest Senate majority in a generation to the second-largest Senate majority in a generation,” he said.

Still, the Democrats’ unease was palpable. Of the 36 Senate seats at stake in November, 18 are now held by Democrats.

Seven of the eight questions posed to Obama came from senators up for re-election this year, and they had a similar theme: “This place looks broken to the American people,” as Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., put it.

Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., who also faces a tough re-election fight, twice wanted to press the point further, stressing that Democrats need to appeal to moderate Republicans, conservative Democrats and independents to win elections.

“So my question to you, Mr. President, is, speaking to independents, conservative Democrats, moderate Republicans — people who know we have to do this — why should the Democratic Party be trusted?” Bayh asked.

Remind constituents, Obama said, that the last time the budget was balanced, for four years beginning in fiscal 1998, Bill Clinton was president.