WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Saturday disavowed what she termed as Republican “personality attacks” over President Obama’s stimulus bill, reiterating previous arguments that the legislation allowed for bipartisan input.
“The people who can’t win on policy always resort to process and then they stoop to their personality attacks,” Mrs. Pelosi told reporters here at the Kingsmill golf resort, where about 200 House Democrats gathered for a three-day retreat. “The process afforded Republicans every opportunity to put their suggestions forward and they know that.”
Her defense of the House version of the stimulus package — crafted solely by Democrats and passed without a single Republican vote — were buoyed by House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, who said there “was a lot of bipartisanship.”
“The bipartisanship was in defeat of the Republican proposals that were put on the House floor,” said Mr. Hoyer, of Maryland.
House Republicans quickly hit back, arguing that the White House and House Democrats are not on the same page.
“Two months ago, President Obama never thought the biggest obstacle to delivering the ’change’ he promised would be Speaker Pelosi and Steny Hoyer,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Minority Whip Eric Cantor. “House Republicans have made creating and protecting jobs their focus and it must be extremely frightening to like minded Blue Dogs like Brad Ellsworth and Gene Taylor that their views would be disregarded so harshly by their leaders.”
Added Michael Steel, a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner: “The House Democratic leadership’s failure to understand what bipartisanship is may explain why, despite the President’s repeated calls for it, they crafted a partisan bill that was rejected by every single Republican and nearly a dozen Democrats.”
Democratic leaders took the press to task for their coverage of President Barack Obama’s speech here Thursday night, in which he seemed to ratchet up his rhetoric toward critics of his nearly-$1 trillion bill.
In his mostly ad-libbed remarks, Mr. Obama said Republican proposals calling for more tax relief and less spending would mean a return to the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin.
Mr. Hoyer said he was surprised to see the media cover the president’s speech as a departure from an earlier tone of bipartisanship as opposed to a consistent espousing of principles. “I was perceived somehow as some real change in strategy,” Mr. Hoyer said. “It was not at all. We believe there are certain priorities, he believes there are certain priorities that we ought to pursue.”
Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina said Mr. Obama’s deviation from a teleprompter simply meant that he “began to express these things from his heart.”
“Over the last two years, that’s the way he connected with the American people,” Mr. Clyburn said.
House Democrats said they look forward to negotiations next week to reconcile the House version of the bill with the Senate version, which is expected to pass after three moderate Republican senators signed onto a lower-priced compromise.
But Mrs. Pelosi, when asked what items she would be willing to see go from the $819 billion House version to help align it with the Senate’s pending $780 billion deal, said she wouldn’t speculate until the Senate approves its bill.
“We don’t have a final product from the Senate but we can focus on a great deal of similarity in the bill for hundreds of billions of dollars and then get down to the finer points,” she said, adding that “$40 billion isn’t that fine a point.”
The Senate reached a tentative deal Friday night after a group of moderate Democrats and Republicans, led by Sens. Ben Nelson, Nebraska Democrat, and Susan Collins, Maine Republican, agreed on cutting roughly $85 in spending and $25 billion in tax cuts. The reported $780 billion price tag does not include several amendments that Republican leaders have said would bring its total cost more than $827 billion.
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