What's weighing on Obama

Watch President Obama's press conference on CNN.com/Live and the CNN app for iPhone, starting at 11 a.m. ET Friday.

Washington (CNN) -- President Obama, looking to assure the country that he's the man with an economic plan, is taking his message to the media, and ultimately, the American public.

His Friday press conference at the White House undoubtedly will focus on the economy, but other controversial topics more than likely will come up: from the Florida pastor who had threatened to burn Qurans on September 11 to the building of an Islamic center near ground zero to the possibility that chief of staff Rahm Emanuel will leave his post to run for mayor of Chicago, Illinois.

CNN takes a look at the top issues Obama is facing on the economic front before the critical midterm elections in November.

Meeting the press

Friday's p ress conference is his first full-scale, question-and-answer session at the White House in nearly four months.

His last news conference there was on May 27 in the East Room, and was devoted in large part to the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It will be Obama's eighth news conference since taking office.

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Opinion: Beware loaded language in Islamic center debate

Editor's note: Roy Peter Clark is vice president and senior scholar of the Poynter Institute and founding director of the National Writers Workshops. He has taught writing for more than 30 years and has spoken about the writer's craft widely. He is the author of the recently released, "The Glamour of Grammar."

(CNN) -- The usual incivility and hyperbole of the internet gets magnified on hot-button issues, especially when they concern religion, politics and ethnicity.

So as I've read through the feedback loops accompanying reports and commentary on the so-called ground zero mosque, it has not surprised me to find flaming insults coming from both extremes.

On one end, we find an internet preacher named Bill Keller (no, not the editor of The New York Times) who calls Islam a "1,400-year-old lie from hell." And on the other, a new word has been coined to describe such expressions: "Islamophobia." Meanwhile, the right focuses on the dangers posed by fanatics they call "Islamofascists."

Islamophobia vs. Islamofascism. Not much wiggle room for moderate debate there.

The debate over Cordoba House is, in part, a fight over language -- a battle, according to Iman Feisal Abdul Rauf, one of its planners, over who controls "the discourse." And so, news consumers should stay alert to the fact that partisans in this and every ideological battle fight for the upper hand by framing the debate in language favorable to their position.

For example, is the proposed construction project a "mosque" or a "community center"? Is it "at" the spot where the twin towers fell, or just "near"? Should that now infamous place where so much dust turned to dust be described in the lower case as "ground zero" or in the upper case as "Ground Zero"?

Defenders of the project, including New York's mayor, have pointed out that what is proposed is not a mosque, per se, but a cultural and community center, and that its location would be more than two long blocks from the hallowed ground capitalized some places now as a proper noun: "Ground Zero."

Opponents of the project have been louder and more organized and, as a result, you may have seen them more in the news. The high-minded among them use the language of law and ethics: that with freedom comes responsibility, that just because you have the "right" to build does not mean that you "should" build.

Fiery abstractions may heat up public discourse, but more meaningful arguments turn on much smaller language distinctions and definitions.

Farah Pandith, an American government expert on the Islamic world, said on CNN that while Islam comprises "one-fourth of humanity," it is the "small voices that are making hay," with hateful language. Dalia Mogahed, an analyst of research on Islam, argued on the same show that what young Muslims around the world most desired from the West was "respect" and help with "economic development." Such moderate language can hardly compete with images of Qurans or American flags being consumed by flames.

S.I. Hayakawa, the great semanticist who would become a U.S. senator, wrote in 1939 about the need for unbiased reporting as an instrument of self-government. To write a straight report, he wrote, the author must avoid "loaded words."

In commentary, religious imagery gets picked up on our emotional radar in words such as "sacrifice," "sacrilege," "martyrs." On the other side our civic loyalties respond to talk of "freedom of religion" and "intolerance."

To understand the language of the debate, readers need a propaganda filter, the ability to distinguish between a word's denotation -- or explicit meaning -- from its connotation -- it's secondary, and often emotional meaning.

Connotatively, a "community center" carries benign associations, of people coming together from all walks of life. To some American ears, the word "mosque," on the other hand, stills sounds exotic, al ien and even dangerous, the way "temple" might have in an earlier era .

Using "mosque" can become a disguised editorial, often appearing in the sheep's clothing of straight reporting. In the post 9/11 era, it has become a loaded word, even though it has a long history, going back to Aramaic (the language of Jesus!) meaning, simply, "to bow down, worship." The supporters of the Cordoba House project realize this and have been at pains to use "cultural center."

And what about ground zero? Without capital letters the word denotes these definitions in the American Heritage Dictionary: 1) target of a missile 2) area where an atomic bomb is detonated 3) a center of explosive change 4) a starting point (a synonym for "square one").

These are strong images that skirt the the term's new weight in American language. None of these definitions captures the emotional power of the destruction of 9/11 and its aftermath. Yes, the twin towers were destroyed by jetliners turned into missiles. But, if I had to define it now, I would want to include a connotation of "hallowed ground"; Ground Zero (in the upper case) is, after all, a place where pilgrims and tourists visit to remember the dead, to pray, to sing hymns, to cry.

Consider then the rhetorical power of juxtaposing "mosque" with "Ground Zero," especially as it is used and received by opponents of the project. Even without terms like "an affront to the memory of those who died on 9/11," as one news report put it in describing objections, the propaganda effect of this odd coupling is to suggest that the proximity of an Islamic holy place defiles the now sanctum sanctorum of America's civic religion.

Our emotional struggles over the legacies of 9/11 will not go away, but our attention to the way the language of the debate colors our view should not either.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roy Peter Clark.

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Palin Backing O'Donnell Campaign In Delaware

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Thursday endorsed Christine O'Donnell's Senate bid in Delaware, hoping to give another Tea Party-backed candidate a final push to defeat an establishment favorite.

The former Alaska governor announced the endorsement on radio host Sean Hannity's program and on her Facebook page.

"Please support Christine O'Donnell in Delaware," Palin wrote to her supporters on Facebook. "She will support efforts for America's energy security, patient-centered health care reform, cutting government waste and letting the private sector thrive and prosper!"

The endorsement could provide a major boost for O'Donnell, locked in a bitter primary against Rep. Mike Castle but short on campaign cash. While the Tea Party Express has pledged $250,000 to help O'Donnell, her campaign financial reports filed on Aug. 25 show she raised about $260,000 total for her bid and had about $20,000 in the c ampaign bank account.

Castle, a nine-term member of Congress and a two-term governor, raised $3.2 million and had $2.6 million cash on hand.

Palin hinted at Castle's long tenure in her unusually brief message on Facebook.

"We can't afford 'more of the same' in Washington," she wrote. "Christine will help usher in the real change we need to get America on the right track."

Tuesday's primary contest is expected to draw about 30,000 registered Republican voters. The winner will face Democratic county executive Chris Coons in November.

Palin, the Republicans' 2008 vice presidential nominee, has become a coveted endorsement. Her backing of Joe Miller in their shared home state helped defeat GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the Alaska GOP primary.

Castle's campaign dismissed the backing.

"Tuesday's pr imary will be decided by grassroots Republican voters here in Delawar e, not out-of-state interest groups who are working to control the outcome," spokeswoman Kate Dickens said. "Mike Castle has overwhelming support from respected conservative Delawareans, including former Gov. Pete DuPont and Judge Bill Lee, who know that Castle is the true fiscal conservative and the only candidate who can win this seat for Republicans in November."

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