President Obama used a town hall meeting in the District to defend his administration’s handling of the economy and argue that Republican budget proposals would undercut the economic recovery. It’s a scene likely to play out repeatedly before the 2012 election as Obama seeks to assure voters he is up to the task of jump-starting a sluggish jobs market.
With gas prices lingering around $4 a gallon and unemployment at 9 percent, however, it’s not the easiest sell. Despite a recent spike in the president’s overall approval ratings, the public is less enthusiastic about his handling of the economy.
During the town hall meeting, taped Wednesday but aired Thursday on CBS’s “The Early Show,” Obama said much of the economic uncertainty of the past several years has been alleviated and that the private sector needs to increase hiring and “start placing their bets on America.”
He also spent much of the hourlong meeting attacking Republican proposals for reducing the deficit, particularly the GOP’s opposition to eliminating the so-called Bush tax cuts for households making more than $250,000.
“Now what the Republicans say is we’re not going to ask any sacrifices from folks like me,” Obama said. “In fact, I get a $200,000 tax cut. And in order to pay for that we’re going to slash education by 25 percent. We’re going to cut transportation by 33 percent. We’re going to cut investments in clean energy by 70 percent. And that doesn’t, from my perspective, make sense if we’re concerned about how do we create jobs for the future.”
Obama was mostly on friendly terrain, answering questions about gas prices, the housing slump, small businesses and other kitchen table issues that dominated previous town halls — and will likely drive neat year’s presidential campaign.
Karin Gallo, seven months pregnant, building a house and about to lose her job at the National Zoo, asked the president what he would do in her situation.
“I think the feeling on the other side of the aisle is that we want to just cut and cut and cut,” he said, attacking the Republican blueprint for reducing the deficit. “And that somehow is going to create economic growth. Now, the truth of the matter is, our biggest problem when it comes to jobs right now is not in the private sector. The reason the unemployment rate is still as high as it is, in part, is because there have been huge layoffs of government workers at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level.”
Obama said he was committed to bringing down the deficit but argued he inherited $1 trillion in unfunded tax cuts, two wars and an unfunded prescription drug plan for seniors.
“There’s no doubt that we’re in a better place than we were when I first came into office,” he said. “We had just lost four million jobs in the previous six months. The financial system was melting down. In the few months after I took office, we lost another four million jobs.”
Republicans disputed Obama’s self-assessment.
The National Republican Congressional Committee called the town hall an “economic infomercial [that] can’t erase his record of job-destroying policies that continue to hang over the economy even today.”
