1、Obama Urges Voters to Look Ahead on EconomyPITTSBURGH For President Obama, evangelist of hope and change, its not easy to confront an election season with so little of either. Business Day Live | Tepid Jobs ReportOn Friday, after the release of the third straight anemic employment report, Mr. Obama
2、found himself on a campaign bus tour, conceding that the economy was not generating enough jobs, that the recovery was not taking hold quickly enough, and that too many Americans lacked basic financial security. “Its still tough out there,” Mr. Obama said to a sympathetic crowd in an elementary scho
3、ol gymnasium in Poland, Ohio. Later, in Pittsburgh, he said, “Too many of our friends and family members and neighbors are still out of work; too many folks still are seeing their home property values underwater.” With few signs that the labor market will strengthen much before Election Day, Mr. Oba
4、ma is honing a vocabulary to talk about the listless economy one that emphasizes a glass-is-half-full approach to the numbers and an appeal to voters to take the long view when assessing the nations economic fortunes. The president dug out the few tidbits of good news from the June report, pointing
5、out that businesses generated 84,000 new jobs last month and 4.4 million over all since the end of the recession. Among those millions, he went on, 500,000 were in manufacturing a relevant yardstick on a whistle-stop tour of two industrial states. “Thats a step in the right direction,” he said. “But
6、 we cant be satisfied because our goal was never to just keep on working to get back to where we were back in 2007.” The president then pivoted to longer-term economic trends, which he said have deepened inequality and put at risk the future of the middle class. Lengthening the frame of reference al
7、lows Mr. Obama to argue that the problems of today are not principally his fault, but the result of a Republican philosophy practiced by the Bush administration and advocated by Mr. Obamas challenger, Mitt Romney. “We tried it and it didnt work,” Mr. Obama said to 6,500 supporters under a scorching
8、sun at Carnegie Mellon University. “So why would we want to go backwards to the same theory that didnt work before?” Still, the poor job numbers cast a shadow over a two-day swing that began in the afterglow from the Supreme Courts decision last week to uphold the presidents health care law. The new
9、s also gave Mr. Romney a chance to seize the offensive again after days in which his campaign bobbled its response to whether the part of the law that imposes a fee for lack of insurance is a tax. “Theres a lot of misery in America today,” Mr. Romney said in New Hampshire, where he is vacationing. C
10、alling the latest numbers a “kick in the gut,” he said, “the presidents policies have clearly not been successful in reigniting this economy, in putting people back to work and in opening factories across this country.” For Mr. Obama, the jobs report has become a nerve-rattling monthly exercise that
11、, for the last three months at least, has held almost no good news for him. White House officials insist that the president is not buffeted by the vagaries of the statistics, but even the longer-term trend, which they say is critical, has not been favorable. “These numbers confirm that this economy
12、is stuck just north of neutral,” said Jared Bernstein, a former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Were making progress, but its much too slow.” Mr. Bernstein said there was little point in Mr. Obama trying to sugarcoat the economy. But he said the president could make a c
13、redible case that he had broken the Great Recession but, because of gridlock in Washington, had not been able to finish the job. The White House made essentially that argument in a statement by Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He said Mr. Obama had proposed to give
14、tax benefits to companies to move jobs back to the United States and to provide funding for local governments to hire hundreds of thousands of teachers. Mr. Obama struck a modest blow for job creation after he returned to the White House on Friday evening. He signed a $105 billion transportation bil
15、l, which will finance highway, bridge and public transportation projects for 27 months. The president began the day at Anns Place, Josephine Harriss restaurant in Akron. He ate breakfast with three workers from a Goodyear tire factory. His choice of dining partners served as a reminder that in 2009,
16、 the Obama administration filed a trade action against China for dumping tires in the American market. The visit had a sad epilogue when, hours after welcoming Mr. Obama, Ms. Harris, 70, died, apparently of heart failure. The president phoned Ms. Harriss daughter, Wilma Parsons, from Air Force One a
17、nd “expressed his sorrow and his condolences,” said the White House press secretary, Jay Carney. Mr. Obama played up the blue-collar flavor of his trip with an oblique swipe at Mr. Romney, who rode personal watercraft this week at his lakeside compound in New Hampshire. The presidents fondest memory of a holiday, he told audiences, was a trip around the United States when he was 11. His family traveled on Greyhound buses and trains and stayed in Howard Johnsons. The biggest thrill, Mr. Obama said, was “to go to the vending machine and get the ice bucket and get the ice.”
