President Obama took his case for a massive economic stimulus plan direct to the American people yesterday, telling a crowd in Indiana that any more delay by Congress to pass his bitterly contested $820 billion package will lead to a national financial disaster.

Borrowing heavily from the populist themes and rhetoric that got him elected, Mr Obama sought to retake control of the partisan debate in Congress over the stimulus Bill by railing against the “posturing and bickering” of Washington politicians. “You didn't send me to Washington because you were hoping for more of the same,” he declared.

Mr Obama's Bill is set to be endorsed by the US Senate today by a slim margin, and with virtually no Republican support. His town-hall rally yesterday in Elkhart, a city that has one of the worst unemployment rates in the US, is part of a hastily arranged campaign blitz to get the US public behind the plan, a strategy with short and long-term motives.

By appealing directly to voters — Mr Obama will campaign for the package in Florida today and Peoria, Illinois, on Thursday — the President wants to increase pressure on his Republican opponents. If he can peel off even an extra handful of opposition supporters in the House and Senate, it will lend the Bill a modicum of bipartisan support. Mr Obama's un-

expectedly bruising fight to get the stimulus plan passed has gone some way to re-energising Republicans after their heavy election defeats in November and has left his hopes of bringing a new era of co-operation in Washington looking increasingly forlorn.

More fundamentally, Mr Obama and his aides know that the stimulus plan could well decide the fate of his presidency. If it fulfils his promise to create or save three to four million jobs within two years his Republican opponents will have little to fall back on. If it fails to deliver — a distinct possibility — the President and his fellow Democrats will have no one else to blame.

Mr Obama's strategists therefore want to build as much popular support as possible for the measure, because they realise that they will need as much patience as they can muster among voters in the face of an economic crisis that Mr Obama said could take years to turn around. “I can't tell you with 100 per cent certainty that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hoped,” Mr Obama said. “But what I can tell you with complete confidence is that endless delays or paralysis in the face of this crisis will bring only deepening disaster.”

In an incident that he will hope does not become a metaphor for his efforts to revive the economy, Mr Obama banged his head hard as he boarded Marine One, the presidential helicopter, on his way to Indiana.

In recent polls barely half of Americans supported the plan. Yet when asked how Mr Obama was handling the issue two thirds backed him, with only a third expressing support for congressional Republicans, according to the latest Gallup poll. David Axelrod, Mr Obama's chief adviser, said on the flight to Indiana that the Gallup survey showed that “there's a whole different conversation in Washington than there is out here. The American people are desperate for us to act.”

Republicans oppose the plan because they claim that it contains wasteful, untargeted spending and will greatly increase the already ballooning national budget deficit.

Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, will outline today a separate plan for the stricken banking sector. He will explain how the second half of the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package passed last year will be spent.

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