Obama Says Election Offers a Clear Choice on the Economy’s Long-Term Path
Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Obama delivered a speech on the economy on Thursday in Cleveland.
By HELENE COOPER and MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: June 14, 2012
CLEVELAND — Framing his re-election bid as a stark choice between government action to lift the middle class and a return to Republican economic policies that he said had caused a deep recession, President Obama on Thursday called the presidential decision facing Americans a clear-cut one that will determine the long-term trajectory of the economy.
“This November is your chance to render a verdict on the debate over how to grow the economy, how to create good jobs, how to pay down our deficit,” Mr. Obama told enthusiastic supporters at Cuyahoga Community College here. “Your vote will finally determine the path that we take as a nation — not just tomorrow, but for years to come.”
The address, by a president who sounded as if he realized he was in a fight for his political life, represented a determined effort to stem two weeks of political and economic sliding that began with a grim jobs report. It came on a day of political gamesmanship in this crucial swing state, as Mitt Romney, the president’s rival, scheduled a speech 250 miles away in Republican-friendly Cincinnati in an effort to overshadow Mr. Obama and pre-emptively attack him for failing to revive the economy.
Speaking shortly before Mr. Obama in remarks that, like the president’s, were carried on cable news programs, Mr. Romney said Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign felt compelled to deliver a major address on the economy “because he hasn’t delivered a recovery for the economy.”
“Now, I know that he will have all sorts of excuses, and he’ll have all sorts of ideas he’ll describe about how he’ll make things better,” Mr. Romney said. “But what he says and what he does are not always the exact same thing. And so if people want to know how his economic policies have worked and how they perform, why they can talk to their neighbor and ask if things are better.”
In his remarks, the president acknowledged that divergent views between him and Mr. Romney on how to revive the economy would define the election.
“There is one place I stand in complete agreement with Mr. Romney,” Mr. Obama said. “This election is about our economic future.”
The president offered no new policy prescriptions in his speech, which he instead used to try to regain the offensive by contrasting his agenda with his own detailed account of the Republican alternative. Mr. Obama said the nation was slowly “digging out of a hole that is nine million jobs deep,” and he blamed Republican policies over the previous decade for driving up the deficit and benefiting the rich at the expense of the middle class. He said a Republican victory in November would mean a return to the “theory that the best way to grow the economy is from the top down,” and he called the election “the make-or-break moment for America’s middle class.”
Point by point, the president listed the Bush-era economic and policy choices — embraced by Mr. Romney and Congressional Republicans — that he said had led to the recession of 2008 and 2009: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that was added to the deficit. “I don’t believe that the government is the answer to all of our problems,” Mr. Obama said. But, he said, “what is holding us back is not a lack of big ideas, not a matter of finding the right technical solution.”
“What is holding us back is a stalemate in Washington between two fundamentally different views between what direction America should take,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Romney, whose staff hastily moved up his speech so he could beat the president to the podium, said that private enterprise, not government, was the key to expanding the economy, and that the Obama administration’s policies on financial regulation, health care and energy had stifled that growth and had held back the recovery.
“I think he’s made it harder for the American enterprise system to work,” Mr. Romney said. “And I want to change that. I want to make it once again, America once again the most attractive place in the world for job creators.”
In Cleveland, the crowd of about 1,500 at the community college was kept purposely low because this was a “speech, not a rally,” campaign aides said. (Mr. Obama was buttoned up in a suit, looking somber, and he struck a serious tone throughout the address.) But many in the crowd acted as if they were at a rally anyway, doing the wave, chanting the ubiquitous “fired up, ready to go” slogan from Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign and interrupting his speech with raucous cheers and expressions of agreement.
Mr. Obama’s remarks came as he is grappling with running for re-election as the national jobless rate remains above 8 percent, a daunting level for any incumbent president to overcome, particularly during a hyperpartisan campaign season in which every misstatement is amplified in a 24-hour news cycle. The president, who was hammered by Republicans last week for his statement that the private sector was doing fine, acknowledged the difficult environment.
“There will be no shortage of gaffes and controversies that keep both campaigns busy and give the press something to write about,” he said. “You may have heard I recently made my own unique contribution to that process. It wasn’t the first time; it won’t be the last.”
The Romney campaign sought to take advantage of Mr. Obama’s comment last week and released a campaign advertisement on Thursday titled “Doing Fine.” The ad features a series of sour statistics (“23.2 Million Americans Are in Need of Work”; “Millions of Homeowners Underwater on Mortgages”), and then follows up, repeatedly, with video and audio of Mr. Obama telling reporters during a news conference that “the private sector is doing fine.” It closes with ominous text: “How Can President Obama Fix Our Economy... if He Doesn’t Understand It’s Broken?”
The Obama campaign fired back, releasing a Web video with a highlight reel of Mr. Romney’s own off-key moments. “Corporations are people too, my friend”; “I like being able to fire people”; “I’m also unemployed”; “Some of my best friends are Nascar team owners” — all featured in a one-minute nonstop aria of political miscues.
The simultaneous visits to Ohio showed just how crucial the state’s 18 electoral votes are considered to be in the fall election. Polls show that the men are in a virtual dead heat in the state. For myriad reasons, Ohio tends to be a predictor of the presidential race, but the state is an outlier in some ways. The unemployment rate here, at 7.4 percent, is almost a point below the national rate.
After Cleveland, Mr. Obama headed to New York on another money run, this one a fund-raiser at the home of Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, co-hosted by the Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
No comments:
Post a Comment