For Obama, Another Round With the Economy

It may also be a reflection of how little the president — any president — can do to alter the country’s economic trajectory while he is faced with global forces that shape the financial system in the United States, as well as a domestic political system that has ground to a standstill, particularly over economic issues like taxes and spending.

The new public relations effort, which begins with a major address Wednesday and as many as six economic-themed speeches over the next two months, is intended to give Mr. Obama a chance to claim credit for the improving economy and to lift his rhetoric beyond the Beltway squabbles that have often consumed his presidency.

But the speeches will not contain big new proposals, senior administration officials said Monday, speaking to reporters on the condition that they not be quoted. Nor are they designed to break the hardening stalemate on economic issues between a president and his Republican adversaries in Congress. Instead, they will repackage economic proposals that the president has offered for years — sometimes in new formats, the officials said.

“The point is to chart a course for where America needs to go,” Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior adviser, said in an e-mail to the president’s supporters Sunday night. Officials said that course has improved significantly during Mr. Obama’s administration, giving Americans a sense of stability, if not complete economic security.

Mr. Obama’s adversaries on Monday were quick to point out that the president has frequently launched similar efforts to redefine or restate his economic agenda, often accompanied by rhetoric from his advisers about a new direction or emphasis. Most have run headfirst into opposition on Capitol Hill.

In the fall of 2011, Mr. Obama addressed a joint session of Congress to unveil a $447 billion jobs bill that has not passed. In 2012, as his re-election campaign neared its end, Mr. Obama renewed his vision with a 20-page economic plan. In his State of the Union speech in February, the president refocused on the economy after beginning his second term focused on gun control, immigration, climate change and gay rights.

And just this past May, Mr. Obama announced he was restarting his “Middle Class Jobs and Opportunity Tour,” with stops in Baltimore and Austin.

“They’ve been saying the same thing for four years,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate. “The previous Democrat Congress passed his agenda — Obamacare, the stimulus, thousands of pages of regulations — and the economy is treading water. More taxes, more regulation, and more failures to unleash American energy jobs are not the answer.”

Republicans say Mr. Obama should have spent less time passing health care legislation early in his presidency and more time improving the economic fortunes of Americans.

“Memo to Obama and the White House: speeches don’t create jobs,” said Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee.

Senior administration officials on Monday conceded that the president was partly to blame for the Washington conversation veering away from the economic issues that many Americans believe are the most important. One official said that it was incumbent on Mr. Obama to shift the overall focus of the debate in Washington, and that has not happened.

In some cases, the White House has chosen to spend its time and political capital on other topics. Mr. Obama made it clear early this year that he wanted Congress to make a major push to pass an overhaul of the nation’s immigration system. The president also responded to the shooting of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School by calling for broad new gun laws. His allies argue that the health care law and an immigration overhaul will help the economy, and they blame Republicans for blocking many of Mr. Obama’s economic policies.

But officials also criticized Republicans, especially in the House, for seizing on what the White House says are overblown scandals: the targeting of nonprofit groups at the Internal Revenue Service and the actions of officials in the wake of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

And they noted that some of the distractions in Washington have been out of Mr. Obama’s control. When oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010, it consumed the White House for weeks. Hurricane Sandy’s destruction late last year and the tornadoes in Oklahoma City in May required presidential attention, as did tensions in the Middle East. Even the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case prompted presidential remarks on Friday.

Administration officials said the timing of the speeches was broadly related to the looming fiscal deadlines that are likely to spark bitter fights in Congress later this fall. Republicans are already promising big fights over extension of the nation’s debt limit and new budget battles.

But Mr. Obama’s aides said that the president wanted to avoid using the speeches as a negotiating platform over legislative programs. They said he would talk about housing, jobs, education, retirement and health. But they cautioned reporters not to expect a Congressional to-do list from Mr. Obama.

That decision is driven, the president’s top aides said, by a conclusion that there are no magic answers that will accelerate the economy’s recovery or help provide jobs to the millions of people who are still having trouble finding one.

Administration officials said they hoped Mr. Obama’s speeches would help frame the contours of a conversation that was broader than the Congressional debates in Washington, in part by reaching out to Americans, business owners and others.

Singapore Names Second Round of QFLP Firms

Singapore has awarded additional Qualifying Foreign Law Practice licenses to four international law firms out of 23 that applied.

Sidley Austin; Linklaters; Jones Day; and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher are the four firms that received QFLP status, Singapore's Ministry of Law announced Tuesday. Unlike other foreign firms, QFLP firms are allowed to practice local Singapore law in certain areas and directly hire Singapore-qualified lawyers.

The four new QFLPs join six firms that were awarded licenses when the program was first rolled out in 2008: Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Herbert Smith, Latham & Watkins, Norton Rose, and White & Case.

In deciding whom to name this time around, the ministry said it considered factors including the value of offshore work the firm's Singapore office would generate, the number of lawyers who would be based in Singapore, and the degree to which the Singapore office would serve as a regional headquarters.

The ministry did not name the unsuccessful applicants but firms that had previously said they were applying in this round include DLA Piper, Ashurst, and K&L Gates.

The QFLP scheme embodies the Singaporean government's desire to simultaneously make Singapore a regional hub for international law firms while avoiding complete domination of its local profession by foreign firms. Before the QFLPs were introduced, foreign firms were only permitted to practice local law through joint law ventures with local firms.

These JLVs were nonexclusive, and tensions invariably arose as each firm within the venture continued to freely work with other firms outside of it. Most JLVs involving major U.S. firms quickly collapsed, and most of the large U.K. firms pulled out the moment QFLPs became available. Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy, for instance, were both previously in JLVs with local firms WongPartnership and Shook, Lin & Bok, respectively.

Linklaters' successful QFLP application this time around followed the collapse last year of its JLV with local market leader Allen & Gledhill. The firms' decade-long arrangement fell apart when Allen & Gledhill decided to discuss a strategic alliance with Allen & Overy. Those talks ended without a deal, but the Singaporean government decided to make such tie-ups easier by permitting international law firms to own one-third stakes in local ones.

Though foreign firms are clearly interested in becoming QFLPs, those who have the status largely regard it as "nice to have" rather than a necessity. QFLP firms have hired relatively small numbers of Singaporean lawyers, most of whom are dual-qualified.

House G.O.P. Looks to a Round 2 Obama Hopes to Avoid

“I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed,” the president said, pausing to repeat himself. “We can’t not pay bills that we’ve already incurred.”

But it is not clear exactly how Mr. Obama can avoid engaging in just such a tug of war.

In the wake of the president’s victory on taxes over the New Year’s holiday, Republicans in Congress are betting that by refusing to unconditionally raise the $16.4 trillion debt ceiling, they can force Mr. Obama to the bargaining table on spending cuts and issues like reform of Medicare and Social Security.

That would inevitably reprise the bitter clash over the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011, when the government came close to shutting down before lawmakers and the president agreed to a $1.2 trillion package of spending cuts in exchange for Republican agreement to raise the debt ceiling by about the same amount.

And that is exactly what Republicans want.

The party’s caucus in the House will discuss its debt ceiling strategy at its retreat in Williamsburg, Va., in a couple of weeks, according to a top Republican aide, who said it was determined to insist again on spending cuts that equal the increase in the amount the country can borrow.

“The speaker told the president to his face that everything you want in life comes with a price. That doesn’t change here,” the Republican aide said. “I don’t think he has any choice.”

That strategy could risk a new round of criticism aimed at Republicans from a public weary of brinkmanship. The 2011 fight ended with a last-minute deal but led to a downgrade in the rating of the nation’s debt and a slump in the economic recovery.

But Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner, said Republicans had made it clear what they wanted in exchange for a willingness to allow borrowing to increase.

“If they want to get the debt limit raised, they are going to have to engage and accept that reality,” Mr. Buck said. “The president knows that.”

In fact, the White House has been on notice for months that Republicans view the debt ceiling as leverage in the next budget fight. Now, the question is what Mr. Obama and his advisers can do to sidestep that fight.

One possibility is to turn to business executives for support. Many top chief executives view the possibility of a debt ceiling crisis as a significant impediment to the nation’s economy just as it is beginning to grow again. Those executives might try to pressure Republican lawmakers not to use the country’s credit as a negotiating tool.

Mr. Obama might also take to the road again, using the power of his office to try to convince the public that another fight over the debt ceiling risks another economic crisis. Public polls after the last debt ceiling fight suggested that more people blamed Republicans for the threat of a default.

The president and his aides have signaled that they will try to educate the public by explaining that the increase in the borrowing limit is necessary to cover debts that the government has already incurred. In his statement on Tuesday night, Mr. Obama warned about what would happen if the country did not meet its obligations.

“If Congress refuses to give the United States government the ability to pay these bills on time, the consequences for the entire global economy would be catastrophic — far worse than the impact of a fiscal cliff,” Mr. Obama said.

In the coming days and weeks, Mr. Obama is likely to try to focus negotiations on the other looming issue: how to avoid deep across-the-board cuts to the nation’s military and domestic programs. The deal passed on Tuesday postpones those cuts for two months, but Mr. Obama and lawmakers in both parties are eager to avoid them.

Instead, the president wants a debate over spending cuts and tax changes that would remove loopholes and deductions for wealthy Americans.

That fight is coming. The question is whether the president can avoid conducting it in the middle of a nasty, drawn-out debate over the debt limit.

Pornographers Win Round in Federal Court Over Record Requirements

A suit challenging two statutes that require pornographers to keep lists of their actors and make them available to the government has survived in federal court.