NEW YORK — Aligning himself with a public fed up with economic uncertainty and Washington gridlock, President Barack Obama declared Thursday: “There is nothing wrong with our country. There is something wrong with our politics.”
Obama aired his frustration with the ways of Washington at an event in Michigan before pivoting to his re-election campaign and a pair of big-money fundraisers in New York City.
In New York, Obama said he told his Holland, Mich., audience that it deserves better than what it’s been getting on Capitol Hill.
“They look at what’s happening in Washington, and they think these folks are really from outer space because they don’t seem to understand how critical it is for us all to work together — Republicans, Democrats, independents — in order to move this country forward,” he said.
He added that the country is realizing the need to get involved.
“We’re going to have to get engaged, and we’re going to have to speak out,” Obama said. “We’re going to have to register the fact that we expect more, and we expect better.”
It was Obama’s first official trip outside Washington after spending more than a month dealing with the debt debate. Obama said Americans were right to be worried about the country’s 9.1 percent unemployment rate and fluctuations in the stock market. The contentious and partisan debt debate in Washington, he said, has done little to help.
“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen in Washington in the last few months has been the worst kind of partisanship, the worst kind of gridlock, and that gridlock has undermined public confidence and impeded our efforts to take the steps we need for our economy,” Obama said after touring a Michigan factory that makes advanced batteries for alternative-fuel vehicles.
Obama urged the public to tell Washington lawmakers that they have had enough of the bickering and stalemates.
“They’ve got to hear from you,” he said.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, promptly responded, calling the president’s remarks “political grandstanding” and urging him to deliver on promises to outline recommendations for reining in the nation’s deficits.
The president has said he will send those recommendations in the coming weeks to a congressional supercommittee tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in savings. He also said on Thursday that he’d be offering new proposals “week by week” to create jobs, though he provided no details.
Positive signs
