Obama champions fairness for middle class

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama channelled President Theodore Roosevelt last night, embracing a mantle of economic fairness for the nation’s middle class that drew parallels to the progressive reformer’s calls for a “square deal” for regular Americans more than a century ago.

Obama used a speech in small town Osawatomie, Kansas — where Roosevelt delivered his “New Nationalism” address in 1910 — to lay out economic themes of giving middle-class workers a fair shake and greater financial security, concepts the president will probably return to repeatedly during the 2012 campaign.

Only a month before Republican voters begin choosing a presidential nominee, the White House said now is a “make-or-break moment” for the middle class and those hoping to join it.

Obama is pressuring Congress to support an extension of a payroll tax cut that the White House says will give a $1,000 tax cut to a typical family earning $50,000 a year. The president is coupling that with efforts to renew a programme of extended unemployment benefits set to expire on December 31.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress said a holiday-season package was beginning to take a shape that would cost $180 billion or more over a decade. It would include not only the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefit renewals, but also a provision to avert a threatened 27% reduction in fees to doctors treating Medicare patients.

Even so, Republicans continued objecting to a scaled-back version of the bill by Senate Democrats partly paid for by raising taxes on people earning $1 million or more a year.

Republicans say such a tax increase would hurt job creation by businesses, and strong GOP opposition to that bill is likely to lead to its defeat on the Senate floor later this week. With polls showing public support for boosting taxes on the wealthy, Republicans say Democrats are going ahead with that Senate vote in an attempt to embarrass them.

In Kansas, Obama said the economic struggles many Americans currently face are similar to the conditions when Roosevelt spoke in Osawatomie on August 31, 1910, about a year after he left the White House. Roosevelt declared in the speech that he stood for a “square deal,” which he said did not only mean “fair play under the present rules of the games, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.”

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said that Obama was “desperately trying new slogans and messages to see what sticks because he can’t figure out how to sell his last three years of high unemployment and more debt.”