Several weeks of Sisyphean efforts at building a bipartisan consensus on his $800bn stimulus plan appear to have won the White House very little support from an increasingly hostile opposition. Of the 218 elected Republicans on Capitol Hill, just three have come out in support of the president's plan – and even their support cannot be guaranteed.
With an increasingly “Now or Never” urgency to his efforts, Mr Obama will today take his case to the voters in Elkhart, Indiana, in the kind of “town hall” setting that was a daily event during his 21-month election campaign. Tomorrow he will repeat the performance in Florida. And tonight he holds his first prime-time presidential press conference.
There is no guarantee that any of this will work. In spite of pushing his Democratic colleagues in the Senate to broker a compromise with the three Republicans on Friday night that cut more than $100bn (€78bn, £68bn) in spending from the stimulus package and added in new tax cuts, most Republican opposition appears only to have hardened over the weekend.