JAMESTOWN, N.C. — President Barack Obama sought Tuesday to recapture some of the bipartisan appeal that helped get him elected, while using the opportunity to assail GOP lawmakers for blocking his jobs bill.
Appearing in politically important North Carolina to promote his economic measures and his re-election, Obama promised he would work with GOP lawmakers on any serious plan they put forward to help get Americans back to work.
“I’m not the Democratic president or the Republican president. I’m the president,” Obama said as the supportive crowd at a community college near Greensboro rose to its feet. The comment echoed Obama’s 2008 campaign trail refrain about America being the “United States” and not simply a collection of red states and blue states.
Bipartisan rhetoric aside, Obama has had few discussions with the GOP about the $447 billion jobs bill that Senate Republicans blocked last week. The bill is being broken into pieces so Congress can vote on its individual components.
“We got 100 percent ‘no’ from Republicans in the Senate,” Obama said. “Now that doesn’t make any sense.”
He said the GOP’s jobs plan amounts to gutting environmental regulations, increasing domestic oil production, rolling back Obama-era reforms of the financial system and repealing the health care law enacted last year.
“Now that’s a plan,” Obama said, “but it’s not a jobs plan.”
The top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, in turn accused Obama of accepting that the economy won’t improve significantly by Election Day and trying to blame anyone but himself for it. McConnell said the public will figure it out.
“The president, I think, has become convinced that the economy is not likely to be much better a year from now. So he has started the campaign 13 months early, and he’s trying to convince the American people that it’s anybody else’s fault but his that we’re where we are,” McConnell said in Washington.
