President Obama's speech in Manhattan on Thursday marks the culmination of a strategic, month-long acceleration of his personal involvement in financial regulation, according to White House and Treasury Department officials.
The appearance at Cooper Union just before midday comes as bipartisan negotiators on Capitol Hill continue to make progress in their efforts to overhaul federal laws impacting big banks and other financial institutions.
But White House officials say that the current attention to the issue comes after Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and a team of administration officials spent more than a year laying groundwork, working quietly even as others in the White House were distracted by the fight over health care.
Obama's role has consisted of two parts, the officials said: making the public case that financial reform is necessary, and privately lobbying lawmakers to pass a sweeping bill.
"We've known that there would be millions of dollars spent by opponents of reform and allies of Wall Street to kill or weaken this bill," said White House deputy communications director Jen Psaki. "With that in mind, the goal from the White House has been to make the argument clear on what's at stake."
Another top West Wing aide added, "We are doing the kind of blitz that you saw at the end of health care on regulation reform."
In his speech, Obama will call on financial executives to abandon what he says is their "furious efforts" to block an overhaul bill by hiring an army of lobbyists, according to excerpts released Wednesday night by the White House.
"I am sure that many of those lobbyists work for some of you," he plans to say. "But I am here today because I believe that these reforms are, in the end, not only in the best interest of our country, but in the best interest of our financial sector."
Obama plans to chide those on Wall Street who helped cause the financial meltdown, saying, "A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That is what happened too often in the years leading up to the crisis."
The 700 people in the audience at Cooper Union will include financial industry executives, consumer advocates and other invited guests that the White House described as "representatives of the millions of people impacted by the downturn of the economy."
The administration's focus on stricter financial oversight goes back months: A collection of aides have met weekly, on Monday or Tuesday afternoons, in the White House legislative affairs office to propose reforms and consider the best way to achieve them. A top Democratic Senate aide said that White House and Treasury officials have been in congressional offices every day since the president's inauguration, discussing how to shape regulatory legislation.
The tone of those talks changed March 24, aides on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue agreed, when Obama brought Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd and his counterpart in the House, Rep. Barney Frank, to the Oval Office, one day after the president had signed the health-care legislation into law.
That was a signal, they said, that Obama wanted to begin the final push.
"When the president does public events, it engages a different part of the White House," said a top Obama aide who has been a key member of the campaign for new Wall Street rules.
In the weeks since:
-- Obama has used his weekly radio address to criticize Republican opposition;
-- He threatened to veto legislation that didn't meet his goals; and
-- He held a high-profile meeting with congressional leaders of both parties.
Geithner briefed reporters one day and, along with Obama's top economic aide, Lawrence H. Summers, has spent the last several days talking directly to senators.
In a CNBC interview Wednesday, Obama discussed in detail the complex issue of regulating derivatives, an indication that he has become personally involved in the discussions.
White House officials reject the idea that the legislation's rapid pace is the result of lessons learned from the health-care debate, which critics accused the administration of letting drag on for too long. Instead, they say, the dynamics of the issues have always been different, with bipartisan negotiations on financial regulations making slow progress over an extended period.
But it's no coincidence that the White House has spent little time trying to woo individual senators with sweetheart deals such as the ones that became controversial during the health-care negotiations.
Republicans in the Senate, who spent last week characterizing the legislation as a "bailout" for big banks, accuse Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid of trying to jam an unsatisfactory bill through Congress and of walking away from bipartisan talks.
"His rhetoric got really sharp and really mean" in the last two weeks, one top GOP aide said of Obama. "That's what changed."
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