I would advise the President as follows:
1. He should not think of lowering or setting interest rates unless he wants to copy the Chinese system of Government- Commanded economy. If he still chooses to convert the US economy into a Chinese style economy, he would then have to set the exchange rates, the prices of various other goods and services and yet fail to achieve his objective coming out of recession fast and increasing employment faster. Chinese are somehow managing their economy to grow because they are far poor than the Americans and therefore able to sell cheap to other countries by exploiting their labour which is abundantly available: in the US he will have difficulty in bringing down wages to Chinese levels and still manage to remain President. If he wants not to lose his job by turning USA into a non-market, Government controlled economy, he should allow the Federal Reserve Board to deal with interest rates: whether or not the Fed succeeds in increasing employment by reducing interest rates is not the President's concern.
2. President's focus should be on how by the Government's legitimate actions, the spending power of the households and businesses can be increased. It seems that he has no choice but to continue the stimulus spending for another year. But that alone may not help sustain fall in unemployment rate. He must reduce taxes at the lower levels of income drastically and reduce the corporate tax rates for the next two years so that their effective disposal income increases and they buy more locally produced goods and invest in capacity to produce more. Of course, reducing taxes would mean, the Government will have a larger deficit and high deficit can cause problem of inflation later besides making it costlier for private firms to borrow for their capital projects that create employment. Therefore President should do well to cut certain government expenditures drastically to contain the deficit and further growth of government debt. He must understand that if the expenditure on research and development or on health care or military activities is kept constant or reduced for two years, the heavens will not fall. People have to get jobs to live before they need health care: the economy needs to recover first before its scientists and technologists expand further research activities. There are many such government expenditure items which are unproductive and serve no useful purpose during recession like spending on cultural activities and diplomacy or holding government press meetings and hosting dinners and the like. Government should do well not to buy goods and services that have too much import content for its own use and instead buy domestically produced goods even if they cost more. This reorientation of government expenditure for two years would not hurt the the process of government functioning but reduce government deficit and increase demand for domestically produced goods. President must appreciate that in a deficit situation a $ saved in more important for the country than saving a $ in boom time and that saving a $ of imports is more important to the demand for domestic goods.