ELYRIA, Ohio — President Barack Obama tried to revive his battered agenda and rally despondent Democrats on Friday with a renewed emphasis on jobs. His visit to this struggling Rust Belt city capped a tough first-anniversary week for a presidency that suffered jolts at the hands of Massachusetts voters and the Supreme Court.
“I’m not going to win every round,” Obama told a town-hall audience. But, striking a populist tone on a campaign-style swing, Obama pledged, “I can promise you there will be more fights in the days ahead.”
He used the word “fight” or some variation over a dozen times as he tried out a revamped message focused mainly on the economy, part of a stepped-up effort to persuade Americans he is doing all he can to create jobs.
“This isn’t about me. This is about you,” he said.
Instead of the anniversary celebration Obama might have expected, the past week was one of the worst in recent times for the White House, with much hand-wringing and blame-casting among dazed Democrats in the halls of Congress.
The week brought two major shifts to the political landscape.
• Little-known Republican Scott Brown seized the Massachusetts Senate seat held for decades by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy and cost Democrats their filibuster-proof supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate and seriously threatened Obama’s entire domestic agenda. It means Republicans will be able to stop or seriously slow down legislation at will.
• The Supreme Court ruling Thursday overturning limits on corporate political spending opened the way for businesses and special interests to spend money freely on commercials for or against individual candidates. Obama said the 5-4 decision would allow wealthy special interests to “drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” The opinion could have an impact on this fall’s races that could disproportionately work to the disadvantage of Democrats.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, asserted that his home state “is desperate for a plan to put Americans back to work.” But he said Obama’s health care and climate-change proposals would destroy jobs.
“Like the people of Massachusetts, Ohioans are saying ‘enough is enough’ of the big-government agenda,” Boehner wrote in an op-ed piece Friday in The Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Obama told his audience, at Lorain County Community College, that “the worst of this economic storm has passed. But families like yours and communities like Elyria are still reeling from the devastation left in its wake. Folks have seen jobs you thought would last forever disappear.”
He said a new stimulus-spending bill emerging in Congress — the White House is calling it a “jobs” bill — must include tax breaks for small-business hiring and for people trying to make their homes more energy efficient. Obama defended those two proposals — which he wasn’t able to get into a bill the House passed last month — as necessary to his administration’s widely unpopular moves to bail out financial and auto companies.
In an interview with ABC News this week, a reflective Obama said that he recognized “remoteness and detachment” had set in and that he blamed himself for not communicating better.
“I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people,” he said.
