Showing Our Work for Jobs

Posted by Michael Ricci

June 13, 2012

 Jobs, actual job bills, I do not think so.  These are bills to cut taxes for the rich, take away regulations set up by EPA to protect air, water, land, to not pollute, our environment that we live in. To take away the Affordable Healthcare Act, which gives Americans a say so in their health care. To pass a budget that will cut non discretionary line items that includes medicare, medicaid, and social security. 

 This is a do nothing House: when it comes to real bills for jobs, they voted nay on Obama's jobs' bill, and all the little bills that tried to pass through. The senate has voted and passed a transportation bill, the one the house is mulling over. They have sloshed through and have taken their time, these republicans, wait, oh no, must not do anything that gives this President a foot up.  They want to defeat him and put a republican in his place, but he will just be a figure head.  He does only what his big donors tell him, he flip flops, and he is a lair.  
 

Remember how our math teachers were always saying, ‘show your work’?  In that spirit, Speaker Boehner – a former small business owner – released a new video today in which he appears alongside many of the 30+ bills the House has passed to remove government barriers to job creation in America.  The video is a prebuttal to President Obama’s speech later today in Cleveland, where, despite a recent spate of bad economic news, he is “not likely to unveil new ideas to boost the economy and create new jobs.”
Laid out on his desk, Speaker Boehner notes, are “practical, common-sense proposals to help small businesses create jobs and build a stronger economy for all Americans.”  Among them: bills to cut taxes for small businesses, rein in excessive regulations, and fully repeal to the health care law that’s making it harder for small businesses to hire new workers.  All part of Republicans’ Plan for America’s Job Creators, these proposals remain blocked by the Democratic-controlled Senate, which has shown no urgency to act on jobs bills or even pass a budget.
President Obama hasn’t prodded the Senate – or his own administration – to act, first saying the private sector is “doing fine” and now giving an economic speech that lacks economic proposals. That’s because his team “made clear they don't see many fresh options,” and the president appears to be, well, doing fine with that.  Today’s speech, a pivot to nothing after 40 months of unemployment above eight percent, is yet another indication of a shrunken presidency.
While Democrats try to get the president to ‘reframe’ his message, struggling Americans want him to change his policies.  That’s why the House continues to focus on jobs, with action in the coming weeks to address high energy prices and stop the tax hike scheduled to hit small business job creators on January 1.  “We’re going to keep adding to this pile,” Boehner says in the video, “and we’re going to keep calling on President Obama and Senate Democrats to give these jobs bills a vote.”  Because this isn’t just our work – it’s our work in progress.  To learn more, visit jobs.GOP.gov.

A domestic enemy of the U.S. Constitution

Good day all. I saw this headline in the Washington Times this morning and thought I would see what it was all about. The actual headline read Obama: A domestic enemy of the U.S. Constitution and is an opinion piece by Joseph Curl.


It starts out with the Oath of Office the President of the United States takes at the start of his term of office. That oath reads:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Mr. Curl added the following addendum to the oath:

Unless, you know, 224 years from now, whoever happens to president simply decides he really doesn’t want to do that.”
Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of Barack Obama’s U.S. Constitution

Mr. Curl goes on to talk about the Oath, specifically the section that pertains to “Preserve, protect and defend” The Constitution. As we have seen, Obama considers the Constitution to be an advisory document that he can ignore when it gets in his way, which is most of the time. Mr. Curl goes a bit further:

In 1884, Congress, having no set oath of office, wrote its own: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same …”
Little did they know then that 128 years later, America would face just that: a domestic threat to the U.S. Constitution.

The founders may not have known, but 48% of the voters figured it out, starting with “Joe the Plumber.” Mr. Curl continues:

From the very beginning, the president and his administration made clear they had no intention of enforcing laws they didn’t like. Mr. Obama and his minions decided that they would simply stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act, no longer prosecute growers of “medical” marijuana, and let some states walk away from provisions in the No Child Left Behind law (which, by the way, was co-authored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and passed the Senate by a 91-8 vote).
Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has even more flagrantly flouted the laws of the land. Out of the blue, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, reinterpreted America’s gambling laws (and dumped the decision on Christmas Eve so as to avoid scrutiny). More recently, Mr. Holder has decided to thwart congressional oversight by refusing to release documents on the disastrous “Fast and Furious” gun-running scheme, and he is actively fighting Florida for trying to expunge dead people from its voter rolls.

As Mr. Curl has noticed, this is the most corrupt administration in living memory, if not in U.S. History. Yes, I am including Nixon in that list. No one was murdered in Watergate. Two federal agents and hundreds of Mexican and possible a number of American citizens have been murdered thanks to Holder’s Fast & Furious debacle. If this had been a Republican administration pulling this stuff, the President would be out of office and probably on trial.



The Republicans in the House would love to begin impeachment proceedings against Obama, even if it would leave us with “Brains” Biden for a few months, but the Democrats are so corrupt that they won’t allow it and would use the “Racism” card to attack the Republicans. This is just another indicator of how the Democrat Party has nothing more than a national criminal organization and not a political party. Even the Corleone family knew when to take care of “problems” and “take care of business.” They had rules they would follow and woe be to anyone who broke them.
For the Democrats, it’s all about absolute power and letting nothing stand in their way in getting it. Obama is just the final, and incompetent act in this drama.
Head on over to the Washington Times and read the whole thing.
As always…Remember in November!
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~

CURL: Obama’s a domestic enemy of the U.S. Constitution

By Joseph Curl

Sunday, June 17, 2012

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

“Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation — I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.*

“* Unless, you know, 224 years from now, whoever happens to president simply decides he really doesn’t want to do that.”

— Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of Barack Obama’s U.S. Constitution

The Founders set the course in a simple, concise, 35-word affirmation — the president’s top job is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. The chief executive does, of course, have other responsibilities, but his guardianship of the document they had just written was deemed by the Founders to be of such great import that they made him swear it — aloud, in front of witnesses.

In 1884, Congress, having no set oath of office, wrote its own: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same …”

Little did they know then that 128 years later, America would face just that: a domestic threat to the U.S. Constitution.

From the very beginning, the president and his administration made clear they had no intention of enforcing laws they didn’t like. Mr. Obama and his minions decided that they would simply stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act, no longer prosecute growers of “medical” marijuana, and let some states walk away from provisions in the No Child Left Behind law (which, by the way, was co-authored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and passed the Senate by a 91-8 vote).

Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has even more flagrantly flouted the laws of the land. Out of the blue, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, reinterpreted America’s gambling laws (and dumped the decision on Christmas Eve so as to avoid scrutiny). More recently, Mr. Holder has decided to thwart congressional oversight by refusing to release documents on the disastrous “Fast and Furious” gun-running scheme, and he is actively fighting Florida for trying to expunge dead people from its voter rolls.

Now comes Mr. Obama’s decision to stop enforcing America’s immigration laws. The new policy states that illegal immigrants who were younger than 16 when they entered the country are eligible for a two-year exemption from deportation. Of course, the “deferred action process,” as Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano called it, will apply to illegals up to age 30. (Think when they legally get their driver’s licenses they will also be handed a voter registration card?)

The increasingly desperate Mr. Obama, once a constitutional professor, knows full well he is circumventing Congress. In March 2011 he told a group of young Hispanics: “America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that. That’s part of my job.

“Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws,” he said. “There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”

So why now? Politics. The Hispanic population in Florida, Virginia, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado may well decide the November election, and with working-class whites, religious blacks, disenchanted young people and Jews fleeing in droves, Mr. Obama is looking to shore up his support, even if that means violating his oath to protect the Constitution.

Continuing his nonstop campaign of division — black against white, rich against poor, straight against gay, religious against secular, race against race — the president is seeking to build whatever loose coalition of support he can. Forget bipartisanship; a coalition of the middle, Mr. Obama’s sole path to victory, he thinks, is to stir up so much discontent within different strata that he can win re-election.

Of course, the liberals who whined about President George W. Bush’s signing statements haven’t made a peep about Mr. Obama’s Napoleonic power grab.

“What’s ironic,” columnist Charles Krauthammer noted, “is for eight years, the Democrats have been screaming about the imperial presidency with the Bush administration — the nonsense about the unitary executive. This is out-and-out lawlessness.”

But that doesn’t matter when you are King Barack. The Founders were determined to make sure no American leader ever had the power King George III enjoyed. Which is why they also wrote this in the Constitution: “The president, vice president and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at jcurl@washingtontimes.com.

Opinion: Lawmakers haven’t run out of time to craft a bipartisan deficit deal

By Judd Gregg - 06/18/12 05:00 AM ET

If you are a liberal member of Congress, you are holding an arsenal of options when it comes to cutting the deficit.

By just following the law as it presently is written, trillions of dollars of deficit reduction will occur without any limiting action relative to any entitlements.

The combined effect of allowing the sequester to go forward and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire looks reasonable and rational if you sit on the left. 

The $1.2 trillion in sequestration cuts fall primarily on defense spending. Ending the Bush tax cuts raises between $2 trillion and $3 trillion more. 

To put it another way, a liberal member of Congress holds a lot of good cards and can afford to “stand pat.”  

The irony of the situation is that this approach totally avoids the causes of the massive explosion in the federal deficits and the intolerable debt being layered on our children. 

Medicare and Medicaid are allowed to continue without any attempt to make them work better and be more cost effective, as are agriculture subsidies and student loans. 

Tax reform is ignored, even though it might bring in more revenue and would certainly create a better atmosphere for competitiveness internationally and economic growth.

Rates are simply raised and the wealthy hire more accountants to avoid paying the higher rates. 

Still, the left can claim it is raising takes on the rich.

A few days ago Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, gave a speech which seemed to a be a gratuitous attack on the Simpson-Bowles Commission debt-reduction proposal.  

He said, to paraphrase, that Simpson-Bowles would undermine entitlements that benefit seniors and unnecessarily reduce tax rates, especially on corporations and the wealthy.

It appeared to be a speech that came out of nowhere.  It did not. 

It was finally a fair and honest assessment from the left of why President Obama abandoned the efforts of his own commission. It also explained why the House Democratic leadership — with the notable exception of Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) — opposed any effort to give Simpson-Bowles traction.

Most Americans found the lack of support for Simpson-Bowles from the president and his followers to be confusing and opaque. 

The feeling was especially acute among those who are concerned about the partisanship and failure of the federal government to step up and address the debt in a rational and orderly manner. 

Simpson-Bowles was, and is, the only bipartisan, substantive vehicle that actually reduces the deficit and the debt and makes viable our tax code and programs like Social Security.

It is refreshing, therefore, to have someone close to the administration and the Democratic party leadership be open about why they oppose the commission’s findings. 

This makes the choice for the American people, and those in Congress who wish to pursue constructive action on the debt, rather clear.

The position of the activist left is to abandon any sort of effective or bipartisan action on the drivers of the deficit — specifically entitlement spending and tax policy — in favor of across-the-board cuts that fall primarily on our soldiers and dramatically increase the burden of the already-dysfunctional and counterproductive tax code.

The other choice is to pursue a renewed effort based on a bipartisan and relatively-balanced approach, as set forth in Simpson-Bowles and expanded on by the various working groups in the Senate.

The American electorate is obviously out of sorts with the nonfunctioning, partisan atmosphere they see in Washington. It is difficult to believe voters are going to find the approach of chaotic cuts as the type of governing they want or expect. 

Nor are they likely to endorse it when those cuts are coupled with tax increases based off a tax law that no one understands, and that will aggravate an already sluggish economy. 

Another run at reaching a structured and thoughtful bipartisan plan is going to be far more attractive. It should not only reduce the debt, but also strengthen our competitiveness as a country along the lines of Simpson-Bowles.

This is a time when those who have been elected to govern have an opportunity to do just that.  

They can stay in their corners and allow disorder to rein or they can move the nation away from the impending debt debacle and create an atmosphere of optimism by actually acting on substantive initiatives together.

If they choose the latter, they might even get a thank you and a vote thrown in from a nation that is searching for bold leadership. 

Judd Gregg is a former governor and three-term senator from New Hampshire who served as chairman and ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Foreign Operations. He also is an international adviser to Goldman Sachs.

Canada Seeks Alternatives to Transport Oil Reserves

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: June 13, 2012

LONDON, Ontario — As the United States continues to play political Ping-Pong with the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline, Canadian officials and companies are desperately seeking alternatives to get the country’s nearly 200 billion barrels in oil reserves — almost equal to that of Saudi Arabia — to market from landlocked Alberta.

Michael McElroy for The New York Times

 

Environmental activists who oppose pipelines shut down a hearing in Ontario last month.

A blog about energy and the environment.

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Michael McElroy for The New York Times

Lawyers for Enbridge, a transporter of oil exports, listened to opponents of the company’s pipeline plan at the hearing.

Oil companies complain that they are losing revenues from pipeline bottlenecks. So Canada is plunging ahead with plans to build more pipelines of its own.

To hasten development of new export routes, the Conservative government is streamlining permit processes by accelerating scheduled hearings and limiting public comment. The government has also threatened to revoke the charitable status of environmental groups that are challenging the projects. And Public Safety Canada, the equivalent of the United States Department of Homeland Security, has classified environmentalists as a potential source of domestic terrorism, adding them to a list that includes white supremacists.

After President Obama refused to grant a permit for Keystone XL in January, Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, indicated that he would never again be “held hostage” to United States politics, saying that some Americans saw his country as “one giant national park.” He said Canada would redirect oil that had been destined for Gulf Coast refineries to other countries, particularly China.

While Joe Oliver, Canada’s minister of natural resources, said in an interview that the United States would remain Canada’s “most important customer,” billions of barrels of oil that would have been refined and used in the United States are now poised to head elsewhere. Expansion of Canada’s fast-growing oil-sands industry will be restricted by the lack of pipeline capacity before the decade’s end, he said, which “adds to the urgency of building them so that the resources will not be stranded.”

Three new pipeline network proposals — two that call for heading west and the other east — have been put forward. In May, Enbridge, a transporter of Canadian oil exports, announced a $3 billion plan called Eastern Access. It is seeking permission to build a new “Northern Gateway Pipelines” network, to bring 525,000 barrels a day to Canada’s Pacific Coast. Kinder Morgan, a Texas-based energy company, said it will nearly double the capacity of an existing pipeline network along a different route.

Together, the new westward pipelines would carry more oil than Keystone XL would. But even with aggressive government backing, creating new pipelines may prove as difficult in Canada as it has been in the United States, though for different reasons.

Indigenous groups must be consulted if new pipelines cross their land. To gain coastal access, pipeline companies must also navigate the politics of some of the most environmentally conscious Canadian provinces, British Columbia and Quebec, where public opinion tends to be against both pipelines and further fossil fuel development.

Vancouver’s City Council recently passed a motion requiring that pipeline companies take on 100 percent liability for the economic and environmental costs of a worst-case spill. Even though the federal government gives permissions for pipelines, such local maneuvering and lawsuits can cause severe delays.

“It’s poetic justice that Vancouver, the birthplace of Greenpeace, stands between the last big oil deposit on Earth and the expanding markets in Asia,” said Ben West of the Wilderness Committee, a consortium of environmental groups. “I’d anticipate it won’t get built for years.”

Mr. Obama said no to Keystone XL over issues of routing and insufficient environmental analysis, after a showdown with Congressional Republicans. No further action is expected before next year, although the pipeline builder, TransCanada, has reapplied for a permit.

But as pipeline companies cast about, the United States may again be drawn into the fray over routes in other parts of the country. The most likely eastern Canadian pipeline route would reverse existing pipelines through Ontario and Quebec, and then cross the border into Vermont, heading to a tanker port in Portland, Me. Such a project was proposed in 2008 but dropped during the recession.

A State Department spokesman said it had not fielded inquiries to revive the idea, but residents of the United States’s Northeast are organizing against it. Without a reliable way out, Canadian oil often trades for $30 a barrel less than other crudes, said Todd Nogier, an Enbridge spokesman. The company estimates its proposed new westbound pipeline will increase Canada’s gross domestic product by $270 billion over 30 years. Chinese companies have already invested in Canadian oil sands.

Environmentalists are not nearly as enthusiastic. One reason is that Canadian oil is extracted in a process that creates relatively high emissions of carbon dioxide. Also, oil from oil sands is exported as bitumen, a gritty paste that must be thinned with chemicals for transport.

The United States Pipeline Safety and Hazardous Materials Administration is studying whether diluted bitumen is more corrosive and prone to dangerous spills than conventional crude, thus requiring special regulation. The report is due next year. A 2010 spill of diluted bitumen from an Enbridge pipeline in Battle Creek, Mich., has cost over $720 million, and parts of the Kalamazoo River remain closed.

In Canada, environmental groups and opposition politicians say Mr. Harper’s government is trampling on civil liberties and due process in its rush to get bitumen to market. Public hearings on proposed pipelines were expedited from the fall to the spring, leaving groups little time to organize and mount challenges to inadequate environmental analysis of the impacts, said Gillian McEachern of Environmental Defense, a Canadian environment group.

Ms. McEachern said that the application process for public comment was made so complicated that many with opposing views were shut out.

Last month here in London, a coalition that included environmentalists and members of aboriginal tribes disrupted what was to have been an obscure public hearing. Enbridge’s Eastern Access expansion plan involves moving bitumen from Alberta east to Montreal by reversing the directional flow in older pipelines that now carry refined oil westward to Ontario. The hearing was solely about allowing a change of direction for a 100-mile pipeline segment.

“We sent a letter asking to speak and didn’t even get a reply,” said Wes Elliot, of the Six Nations indigenous group, one of several dozen ejected by the police for speaking without permission. The hearing was then closed to the public. On the curb outside, he said he worried about spills.

Under Canadian law, aboriginal groups must be consulted about pipeline projects that cross their lands. Enbridge has offered many tribes a 10 percent stake in its westward pipeline project; Graham White, an Enbridge spokesman, said about half have accepted.

Others in attendance said proposed bitumen pipelines would traverse vital agricultural aquifers — concerns that tripped up Keystone XL in the United States.

“They say they’re just tinkering with existing pipeline,” said Steven Guilbeault, co-founder of Equiterre, a Canadian environmental group. “We think they’re doing it bit by bit so they won’t attract attention like Keystone.”

Mr. White said there was currently no plan for a pipeline extending into the United States, but would not rule it out in the case of market demand.

Groups in Vermont and Maine are girding for a fight, concerned most about spills in Maine’s Casco Bay, a center of fishing and tourism. Glen Brand, head of the Sierra Club’s Maine chapter, said that a meeting on the issue in Bangor this spring attracted over 100 people. On both coasts of North America, residents object to a predicted manyfold increase in tanker traffic in harbors where people relocate to enjoy the pristine beauty. Simon Donner, a scientist at the University of British Columbia, sees the pipeline as symptomatic of the weakness of Canada’s climate policy, and said he thinks the Canadian government is underestimating the opposition. “People won’t roll over on this issue,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 19, 2012

A picture caption on Thursday with an article about Canada’s quest for alternatives to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to carry the country’s billions of barrels in oil reserves to market from landlocked Alberta misstated, in some editions, the date of a hearing in Ontario that was shut down by environmental activists who oppose the pipeline. The hearing that several activists were shown attending was last month, not Wednesday.

NYT: Canada Redirecting Energy & Jobs to China After POTUS Rejected Keystone XL

Now, do not get me started on this one. 

Posted by Don Seymour

June 14, 2012

The New York Times published a lengthy reminder today that out-of-work Americans are missing out on thousands of new jobs thanks to President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL energy pipeline.
When President Obama “said no to Keystone XL,” the New York Times says Canada began “plunging ahead with plans to build more pipelines of its own,” “streamlining permit processes” and redirecting energy “that had been destined for Gulf Coast refineries to other countries, particularly China.”
This probably isn’t the story President Obama wanted just before another campaign speech where he didn't "unveil new ideas to boost the economy and create new jobs.” Not with 40 straight months of unemployment above 8 percent, an unpopular health care law that’s making it harder for small businesses to hire new workers, and growing disillusionment with the president’s failed policies.
But it’s not just President Obama -- Senate Democrats are stonewalling on Keystone jobs too.
Among the 30 House-passed jobs bills awaiting action by the Democratic-controlled Senate is legislation “forcing construction of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline project from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico,” says the Associated Press.
While that bill passed the House with a veto-proof majority, House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-FL) says Senate Democrats are “‘unwilling to compromise at all’ on House language that would require the Obama administration to approve items including the Keystone XL oil pipeline.”
Continued opposition to Keystone XL from President Obama and Senate Democrats means “billions of barrels of oil that would have been refined and used in the United States are now poised to head elsewhere” overseas -- and with them goes thousands of new American jobs.
Learn more about the GOP plan for jobs at jobs.GOP.gov, and check out House-passed energy and jobs bills at Speaker.gov/energy.

Immigration cartoons

Randy Bish

Jun

19

2012

OBAMA’S IMMIGRATION POLICY

 

 

David Fitzsimmons

Jun

18

2012

Dream action

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.

Obama in Cleveland                                                                     Romney in Cincinnati

   

“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.

Helene Cooper reported from Cleveland, and Michael Barbaro from Cincinnati.