President Obama made a rare appearance in the White House press briefing room Friday to advocate stimulus spending over austerity, saying the economic crisis in Europe is a reminder to lawmakers here that economic growth should be a higher priority than spending cuts.
“As some countries have discovered, it’s a lot harder to rein in deficits and debt if your economy is not growing,” he said of the economic crisis engulfing Europe. “There’s nothing responsible about waiting to fix your roof until it caves in.”
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Though the president said the U.S. was prepared to absorb economic fallout from Europe, some analysts say further peril there would be calamitous to an already fragile American jobs market.
On the domestic front, the president urged Congress to pass a White House jobs blueprint he says would put the U.S. “on track to have 1 million more Americans working this year.”
The president has called for billions of dollars in spending to hire more teachers and construction workers, saying it would jumpstart a public sector he said is hemorrhaging jobs even as the private sector is “doing fine.”
The president’s remarks bookend a rough political stretch for his re-election efforts. The most recent jobs report showed an increase of the unemployment rate in May to 8.2 percent. Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign outraised Obama for the first time last month. And organized labor, a key Democratic constituency, was dealt a major blow with Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in a recall election there Tuesday.
Republicans dismissed Obama’s focus on Europe as an attempt to distract the American public from his own dismal jobs performance.
“Maybe the president should start considering that the headwinds we’re facing are his economic policies,” the Republican National Committee said in a statement prior to the president’s remarks.
The president was also forced to ward off attacks from Capitol Hill that his administration was leaking national security documents for political gain.
“The notion that my White House world purposely release classified national security information is offensive,” Obama said in his lone pivot away from economic matters.
