President's Economic Guru Begs Senate to Agree on Rescue Plan

Barack Obama will launch a campaign to reassure Americans of his leadership on the economy today and prevent his rescue plan from stalling in Congress.

Less than three weeks after his arrival at the White House, Obama is struggling to persuade a divided Congress to move ahead on an $800bn-plus (about £540bn) economic rescue plan.

The White House had hoped to have a bill ready for Obama to sign by 16 February, when Congress is due to go into recess. But with that in doubt the president deployed his weightiest economic ally, the White House adviser, Lawrence Summers, yesterday to launch a persuasion campaign. "This [the present state of the economy] is worse than any time since the second world war. It's worse than I think most economists like me ever thought we would see," the former treasury secretary told ABC television.

Obama will take the push on the road today. He is due to travel to Indiana town, where unemployment has more than tripled to 15%, and will hold a press conference tonight in an attempt to build public support for the rescue plan.

Tomorrow the president is due to travel to Fort Myers, Florida.

Obama also devoted his weekly radio and internet address to the economic rescue plan on Saturday, spelling out how many jobs it would create in hard-pressed states. "Americans across this country are struggling," he said. "Let's do whatever it takes to keep the promise of America alive in our time."

The package of spending measures and tax cuts has run into criticism from liberals, who say it does not go far enough, and conservatives, who attack it for wasteful spending. On Saturday, Democrats stripped more than $100bn in spending from the bill at the behest of Republican senators. Those cuts, including $40bn to state governments, encouraged three Republican senators to support the bill, giving the Democrats enough votes to assure its passage. But a number of prominent Republicans who want more tax cuts and less government spending still threaten to oppose the bill when it is put to a vote in the Senate, possibly tomorrow.

They say they will also hold up efforts to craft a compromise with the version adopted earlier in the House of Representatives. "We want some time to go through it," John Ensign, a Republican senator from Nevada, told NBC television.

John McCain, Obama's opponent in last November's election, said he would vote against the plan. "I know we're in trouble. I know America needs a stimulus, we need tax cuts, we need to spend money on infrastructure and other programs that will put people to work. But this is not it," he told CBS television.

Resistance from Republicans could wreck Obama's hopes of reaching agreement between the House and Senate bills and getting the plan through before Congress goes into recess in mid-February.

Appearing on a number of television chat shows yesterday, Summers said the house and Senate were "90%-plus" in agreement on the two versions of the bill.

But he also took a shot at Republican critics. "Those who presided over the eight years that brought us to the point where we inherited trillions of dollars of deficit, an economy that's collapsing more rapidly than at any time in the last 50 years, don't seem to be in a strong position to lecture about the lessons of history," he said.

"We need an approach that is very different than the approach that brought us to this point. That's what the president is providing."