County residents’ reaction mixed to Obama speech

Published 11:11 pm Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Dedric Alexander of Lynn­wood is looking for a new line of work after his job as a chauffeur slowed to a crawl in the slumping economy.

“It has been hard, no ifs, ands or buts about it,” the 31-year-old man said.

Alexander planned to watch President Barack Obama’s address Tuesday night and has faith in the nation’s new leader to pull the country out of its financial doldrums. Helping out the auto industry and the economic stimulus package are a start, he said.

“He’s laying a foundation first,” Alexander said. “What do you do when you build a house? You build the foundation first.”

Alexander is the type of person Obama and Congress say they’re aiming to help with the recently approved $787 billion economic stimulus package and $75 billion mortgage bailout plan.

The new president, a little more than a month into his term, enjoyed a 59 percent approval rating heading into his address to Congress on Tuesday, according to a Gallup poll.

Some in Snohomish County are skeptical of Obama’s approach of injecting money into America’s ailing economic bloodstream. Most of those

interviewed Tuesday aimed their criticism at the method rather than the man.

Let the banks and defaulting homeowners fail, said Harry Tran, owner of the Pho On Broadway restaurant in Everett.

Too many people have lived beyond their means, he said.

“People have to learn a new way,” Tran said. “Can I call up the governor and say I need a bailout? If I screw up, what happens? They take everything I’ve got.”

Debra Watson, 45, of Snohomish, could barely contain a grimace when asked about the economic stimulus plan.

She doesn’t believe that the money will go toward projects and programs that really need it.

“There’s a lot of pork in that plan,” she said.

The plan will set the country on a downward spiral, and recovery could take decades, Watson said.

“My grandkids will be paying for this,” she said.

Bill Scheller, 66, of Marysville, agrees.

“This whole thing is dumb,” he said.

He said he would watch Obama’s speech only if he gets home in time from an afternoon at the Tulalip Casino.

Rick Davis of Gold Bar, who works at the Monroe Correctional Complex, has doubts about the plan but is willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt.

“He’s doing it differently from how the Republicans did it, so we may as well give him a shot,” he said.

Elected officials and economists also held varying opinions on Obama’s plans.

The new president has done well in his first month, said Snohomish City Councilwoman Karen Guzak, who supported Obama during the campaign.

“I think he’s had a remarkable start to this administration,” Guzak said. “I think he’s handled a multitude of issues in a really balanced way.”

Her only doubt about the stimulus plan is that it should be larger, she said.

Mukilteo Mayor Joe Marine, who served in the state Legislature and ran for Congress as a Republican, would like to see Obama succeed, he said.

“Regardless of your party affiliation, why you would ever want the leader of the free world to fail is beyond me,” he said.

Still, regarding the stimulus plan, “I haven’t found it to be all that stimulating,” Marine said.

He said that according to a fact sheet given to him last week by the Association of Washington Cities, only $664 million of $4.7 billion targeted for Washington state will go to roads, transit and other infrastructure. Other estimates put the figure at $671 million.

“The rest of it is all social programs,” he said.

Paul Guppy, vice president for research at Washington Policy Center, a Seattle-based free-market think tank, also is skeptical of the plan.

“The best approach would have been to pass an economic relief package that focused on helping people that were hardest hit, mostly the unemployed, to help with transitional training to new jobs,” Guppy said.

Instead, much of the money is going to government programs that won’t further economic growth, he said.

“There’s a lot of laughable waste,” Guppy said.

The worst piece of the economic crisis is that so many Americans feel uncertain about how the government will respond in the near future, Guppy said.

“When there are signals of uncertainty to the market, what human nature tends to do is pull back,” Guppy said. “That’s what caused the Depression of the 1930s to last considerably longer than it should have.”

Marilyn Watkins, policy director of the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute, agrees that confidence is an important factor but believes the stimulus package is a step in the right direction. She said Obama’s initiatives pay attention to the need to boost consumer confidence in the short term and deal with underlying weaknesses in the economy in the long term.

“Part of what we need is confidence to move forward and part of this is having confidence in our leadership,” Watkins said.

John Pittman of Stanwood, who works restoring ornamental woodwork on homes, agreed.

“I don’t like all the negative conversation because a lack of confidence is such a big part the mess we’re in now,” he said.

Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439; sheets@heraldnet.com.