US President Barack Obama sought on Monday to turn up the heat on Republicans for blocking his jobs bill as he started a campaign-style bus tour across states vital to his re-election chances next year.
Hitting the road again, this time in North Carolina and Virginia, Obama struck a populist tone and argued that Congress should pass at least parts of his US$447 billion jobs package that was defeated as a whole last week.
“We’re going to give members of Congress another chance to step up to the plate and do the right thing,” Obama told a cheering crowd at the airport in Asheville, North Carolina, the starting point for his three-day trek in a black armored bus.
Photo: Reuters
As Senate Democrats prepared to force a vote this week on one of Obama’s jobs proposals, which would give states money to employ teachers, the president mocked the Republicans who had blocked his original bill.
“Maybe they just couldn’t understand the whole all at once. So we’re going to break it up into bite-size pieces so they can take a thoughtful approach to this legislation,” he said.
The president’s strategy is to force Republicans to accept his proposals or be painted as obstructionists getting in the way of economic recovery as campaigning for the November presidential and congressional elections next year heats up.
“I need you to give Congress a piece of your mind,” he told about 2,000 supporters packed into a high school gymnasium in Millers Creek, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains.
“Tell them what’s at stake here. There are too many of our fellow Americans hurting and you can’t stand by and do nothing. Now is the time to act,” he said.
Republicans saw Obama’s jobs package as laden with wasteful spending and counter-productive tax hikes for wealthier Americans who tend to be entrepreneurs and job creators.
Their disagreement has extended the deadlock that brought the US to the edge of sovereign default in August when Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on deficit cuts as part of a deal to raise the US debt ceiling.
That impasse makes it unlikely that any major steps to spur hiring will be passed before the election next year, when Obama will be judged for his economic stewardship.
The White House billed Obama’s trip — his second tour through small-town US since he visited the rural Midwest in August — as a chance to reconnect with ordinary citizens.
His itinerary spans two traditionally conservative states he won in 2008, but which polls show he is in danger of losing in his bid for a second term. North Carolina is also the site of the Democratic presidential convention next summer.
However, the White House said the bus tour was official business with all costs covered by taxpayers, not from Obama’s campaign coffers.
Onlookers lined the streets in front of gas stations, fast-food restaurants and shopping malls as Obama’s bus, with dark-tinted windows and red and blue flashing lights, led a long motorcade across the green, rolling hills.
Obama’s focus on retail politicking at this stage suggests he realizes he has a tough road next year and has to start early to hammer home his message that Republicans are refusing to join with him in finding ways to fix the US economy.
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