For a jobs bill in pieces, Obama hits road in NC

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama shops for candy at Mast Gen­eral Store in Boone, N.C., Mon­day. Obama is on a three-day bus tour pro­mot­ing the Amer­i­can Jobs Act. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Susan Walsh)

JULIE PACE

Asso­ci­ated Press

FLETCHER, N.C. — Rolling through small South­ern towns in a campaign-style bus, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama on Mon­day pressed law­mak­ers back in Wash­ing­ton to start tak­ing up pieces of his rejected jobs bill and mocked the Repub­li­cans who had shot it down in total. The Sen­ate moved to vote soon on one part, a plan to help states hire teach­ers, but the pro­posal seemed doomed.

Deep in the moun­tains of polit­i­cally impor­tant North Car­olina, Obama soaked up the region’s autumn beauty at the same time he assailed foes of his jobs leg­is­la­tion, accus­ing them of fail­ing to lis­ten to the public.

Back at the Capi­tol, Sen­ate Democ­rats announced they would act first on a sin­gle part of Obama’s plan, a long­shot bid to help states hire teach­ers and police. A Sen­ate vote could come as soon as the end of the week. If not, it would prob­a­bly fall into Novem­ber because the Sen­ate plans to take a break next week, even as Obama urges quick action.

In North Car­olina, the pres­i­dent directed his most pointed remarks at Sen­ate Repub­li­cans, who last week blocked action on his full $447 bil­lion pro­posal com­bin­ing tax cuts and new spending.

“Essen­tially they said no to you,” Obama told a sup­port­ive crowd out­side Asheville. Not­ing that Repub­li­cans will now get a chance to vote on ele­ments of his jobs agenda one by one, he said: “Maybe they just couldn’t under­stand the whole thing all at once. So we’re going to break it up into bite-size pieces.”

Repub­li­cans denounced the bus trip as noth­ing more than a taxpayer-funded cam­paign trip through two must-win states to try to bol­ster Obama’s stand­ing for the 2012 election.

As he trav­eled along on his impos­ing black bus, there was lit­tle deny­ing the pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics at play at each stop. Over three days, Obama is cov­er­ing the coun­try­side of both North Car­olina and Vir­ginia, two tra­di­tion­ally GOP-leaning states that he won in 2008 on his campaign’s abil­ity to boost turnout among young peo­ple and black voters.

Sen­ate Democ­rats unveiled the first indi­vid­ual bill, which would spend $30 bil­lion to cre­ate or save edu­ca­tion jobs and $5 bil­lion to do the same for police and firefighters.

The money would come from a new half-percent tax on income over $1 mil­lion, a pro­posal vig­or­ously opposed by GOP lawmakers.

Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid promised a vote “as soon as possible.”

The out­come seemed clear: The plan is unlikely to gain the 60 votes it would need to pro­ceed in the Sen­ate. And it’s a non-starter in the Repub­li­can House.

More broadly, some aspects of Obama’s jobs agenda are expected to become law this fall.

The most likely include extend­ing tax breaks for busi­nesses that buy new equip­ment, and offer­ing a $4,800 tax credit to com­pa­nies that hire vet­er­ans. There’s also bipar­ti­san sup­port for repeal­ing a law that requires the with­hold­ing of 3 per­cent of pay­ments to gov­ern­ment contractors.

Democ­rats and the White House, mean­while, are con­fi­dent that Obama’s call to extend cuts in Social Secu­rity pay­roll taxes will pass. A two per­cent­age point pay­roll tax cut enacted last year expires at the end of the year; Obama has pro­posed cut­ting it by an addi­tional per­cent­age point and extend­ing the cut to the first $5 mil­lion of a company’s payroll.

That pro­posal is hugely expen­sive — almost $250 bil­lion by admin­is­tra­tion esti­mates — and it is not clear how and whether the par­ties would agree on how to pay for it.

Happy to be back on the road, Obama found a friendly audi­ence that broke into a chant of “four more years.” Said the pres­i­dent in response: “I appre­ci­ate the four more years, but right now I’m think­ing about the next thir­teen months.”

Still, his travel essen­tially dou­bles as his bid for another term. His jobs bill serves as a plat­form to con­trast him­self with Repub­li­cans on both the leg­is­la­tion and his vision for the nation.

Obama’s poll num­bers are down in both Vir­ginia and North Car­olina, lan­guish­ing in the mid– to low-forties in recent polls. The num­bers mir­ror his approval rat­ings nation­ally. Obama’s cam­paign is press­ing to hold both South­ern states, even choos­ing to hold next year’s Demo­c­ra­tic con­ven­tion in Charlotte.

The president’s bus tour fit into that effort, giv­ing Obama a chance to engage in some of the retail pol­i­tics that is a sta­ple of pres­i­den­tial campaigns.

Obama’s sleek, $1.1 mil­lion bus rolled through North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Moun­tains for more than four hours, an unusu­ally long stretch that included unan­nounced stops.

At Coun­try­side Bar­beque in Mar­ion, he shook hands and took pho­tos, and he also had a chance of to talk to poten­tial vot­ers about his jobs bill. The tour took him through a blaze of bright red and orange fall col­ors. He later stopped at the Mast Gen­eral Store in Boone, near the cam­pus of Appalachian State Uni­ver­sity, for some Hal­loween candy.

Cap­ping his pub­lic com­ments at a high school in Millers Creek, N.C., Obama chided Repub­li­cans again, this time in an appar­ent ref­er­ence to the influ­ence of the tea party. “It’s way over­due for us to stop try­ing to sat­isfy some branch of the party and take some common-sense steps to help Amer­ica,” Obama said.

House Repub­li­cans were quick to point out that they orig­i­nally pro­posed break­ing Obama’s jobs plan into pieces. House Speaker John Boehner’s office said Mon­day that the Ohio Repub­li­can has offered to work the pres­i­dent on aspects of the bill Repub­li­cans agree with but the pres­i­dent opted for a bus trip instead.

How­ever, Obama and his oppo­nents on Capi­tol Hill don’t agree on how much they have tried to agree. Obama insisted he would work with the GOP “in any way pos­si­ble.” Not­ing the angst within some in his own party about his will­ing­ness to com­pro­mise, Obama said: “I tried so hard to coop­er­ate with Repub­li­cans, Democ­rats have been get­ting mad at me.”

Posted by AP News on Oct 17 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.