WASHINGTON — President Obama’s chief campaign strategist yesterday said his boss doesn’t have a “silver bullet” to fix the economy but is doing everything he can.
“The problems . . . were years in the making. They are deep, they are complicated, and they’re going to require sustained perseverance and lots of ideas,” David Axelrod said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“There’s no silver bullet for them,” he said.
Axelrod dismissed criticism that Obama’s latest jobs measures — executive orders that make it easier to refinance student loans and home mortgages — were minor or insignificant.
“It is easy to sit in Washington and make those judgments, but if you’re out there in this economy, these things do make a difference,” he said.
“There’s no panacea,” he said. “But if you’re one of the millions of homeowners who can’t refinance their homes because their home values have dropped even though they’ve made their payments every month, it’s not a small thing. It is a big thing.”
Axelrod complained that Republicans in Congress had thwarted Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill and left the president with no alternative to a piecemeal approach.
He said the only plan offered by Republicans was to revert to the policies that he said helped cause the economic crisis.
“We have ideas,” Axelrod said. “He’s got ideas about how we rebuild the middle class in the long run. And the other side will offer their ideas. Theirs seem to be to go back to what we were doing before the crisis.
“We’re going to have a great debate, and the American people are going to decide where their interests lie and who best represents them,” he said.
Meanwhile, White House senior adviser David Plouffe vowed that Obama would keep fighting to pass the jobs bill piece by piece, including infrastructure spending that could go to a Senate vote this week.
“We’re going to keep the pressure on, because it’s not like we’re in normal times here,” Plouffe said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“There’s only one reason we won’t make a huge impact on the economy, and it’s because [of] the Republican Party,” he said.