NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush will deliver a prime-time televised speech Wednesday night to pressure Congress to pass a $700 billion plan to bail out Wall Street, the White House announced.
President Bush will address the nation Wednesday night about the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package.
Bush's speech is set to begin at 9:01 p.m. ET and will take just less than 15 minutes.
Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke warned Wednesday that the Wall Street crisis is the worst the nation has faced since the end of World War II and urged Congress to take action on a proposed bailout package.
Congress is considering whether to allow Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to use federal funds to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related securities and other assets that have caused turbulence on Wall Street and have undermined credit markets worldwide.
But Paulson and Bernanke faced deeply skeptical lawmakers, including members of Bush's own party, when they pitched the plan before congressional committees Tuesday and Wednesday.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush wants to explain the issues directly to the public.
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"Americans are beginning to understand that a cold on Wall Street could infect Main Street as well," she said. "There are a lot of terms that are very hard to understand."
Perino insisted that the bailout plan is not in trouble on Capitol Hill.
"It could be the opposite," she said. "It could be that we are getting closer. We know we are asking Congress to bite off a lot, but this is not more than they can chew."
The White House had been taken a mostly hard line during the negotiations with Congress, but it is signaling a new spirit of cooperation that suggests the administration realizes the situation is so serious that it will have to compromise in order to get something done.
"This is not take-it-or-leave-it," a senior administration official said. "We'll accept changes."
Minutes before the speech was announced, the Democratic leader in the Senate blasted Bush, accusing him of being "absent from what may well be the most important debate on economic policy in a generation."
"Where is President Bush?" Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada demanded on the Senate floor. "President Bush has sent Congress an unprecedented $700 billion bailout proposal: $700 billion straight from the pockets of every single man, woman and child in America.
"It is time for him to explain how his plan, drafted literally under the cover of darkness, will help America weather this storm."
The senior administration official said the president has been contemplating a prime-time speech for several weeks but finally decided to deliver it tonight because he believes that the situation has reached crisis stage.
"This is a bullet you only fire once," the senior official said. "We have reached a point in the process where we just have to get action."
The official said the president will also try to deal head-on with conservative criticism that he is abandoning free market principles by pushing such a large federal response.
"He will say, 'my first instinct is not to have government intervention, but now I feel that we have to have it,' " said the official.
The president will address questions about his credibility given rosy economic scenarios floated by the White House last year, the official said.
"The Fed chairman and the Treasury secretary were saying the same things as the president last year. Clearly, there has been a shift. The dynamic has changed" in recent days, the official said.
Many remembers of Congress remain skeptical, however. Mike Pence of Indiana, a leading House conservative, said, "There is growing discontent among House Republicans."
Conservative Republicans, in particular, have expressed doubts about the bailout, saying it is a departure from free market principles
Quelle : www.cnn.com
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