White House won’t say that ‘fundamentals are strong’

The White House on Wednesday refused to repeat earlier statements — echoed this week by Republican presidential candidate John McCain — that the fundamentals of the economy are strong even as a Wall Street crisis has deepened amid a major bankruptcy and another federal bailout.

{mosads}White House press secretary Dana Perino was asked repeatedly at the daily briefing Wednesday if the president continues to think, as he has said before, that the economy remains fundamentally strong. Sen. McCain (Ariz.) repeated the president's point Monday, after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, saying that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) seized on McCain's remark as evidence that the Arizona senator is out of touch and lacking in economic knowledge and appreciation of the degree of the current crisis.

Perino would say only that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said "that as he looks at our country and compares it with other countries, that we are in a position of strength to be able to deal with this crisis, and it's going to take us a while to work through it.”

Perino indicated that she would not discuss the statement about the strength of the fundamentals of the economy because her remarks would be used in the presidential campaign.

“I recognize that this issue of strength has come into the 2008 election; I'm not going to try to get involved in it,” she said.

Reporters pressed Perino, noting that the president has used those words repeatedly to assure Americans that the economy is strong and that they can be confident, before McCain repeated that assessment this week.

"What I will tell you is that we have some — on any given day we can have economic news that comes out that's both positive and then negative," Perino said. "For example, in some cases we'll have a day where the productivity numbers are up, GDP is up, but unemployment is up as well, which is not welcome. And so we have a very mixed picture right now, and no doubt we're going through some challenging times, and it will just take us some time to work through it."

Pressed again to say whether the president thinks the fundamentals of the economy are strong, Perino said: "I answered it the way I was going to answer it, and I'll answer it the same way again."

The spokeswoman stated that, if she were to make that assessment or answer the question directly, it would put the White House squarely in the middle of the battle between Obama and McCain, something Perino and the White House have been reluctant to get involved in.

"What I said is that we have the strength to be able to deal with this crisis in our economy," Perino said. "And I know that you're not asking the question in the forum of a 2008 campaign, but I know as soon as I say something you're going to turn it around and it will be a part of the 2008 campaign, and I'm not going to play the game."