In his appearance at Chrysler’s auto plant in Toledo, President Barack Obama repeated the standard themes of his campaign stump speech while downplaying today’s bad economic news. Standing in his shirtsleeves before an audience of union workers, he declared that he was “bettin’ on American workers.”
The president also called for spending cuts and hinted at tax increases. “We’ve got to live within our means, everybody’s got to do their part,” he said. “Middle-class workers like you, though, shouldn’t be bearing all the burden. You work too hard for someone to ask you to pay more so that somebody who’s making millions or billions of dollars can pay less.”
Obama evoked national pride: “[W]e are people who will forge a better future because that is what we do… when we come together, no-one can stop us” – then reprised his ‘Win the Future’ slogan and declared that “we can live out the American dream again… that’s what drives me every day I step into the Oval office.”
The president’s speech followed the narrative urged by former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg. Greenberg argues that Obama and other Democrats can win majority support from the public if they hit the right notes – investment, solidarity, America, the Middle Class – while avoiding blame for the current stalled economy.
But Obama did suggest that Republican policies were to blame for the economic downturn. “In the year before I took office, this industry lost more than 400,000 jobs… we could have done what a lot of folks in Washington thought we should do, and that is nothing… just let US automakers go into an uncontrolled free-fall… we refused to let that happen,” he said before praising his own policies.
“We’re still feeling the sting of the recession… even though the economy is growing, even though it has created more than 2 million jobs in the last 15 months,” Obama said. This was his main reference to May’s disappointing jobs numbers, which showed the economy generated only 54,000 new jobs last month, including roughly 20,000 jobs at McDonalds outlets. The job creation total would have been higher except for the loss of 5,000 manufacturing jobs and 29,000 government jobs. The May numbers were just one-third the 150,000 forecast by economists, and nudged the unemployment rate back up to 9.1 percent.
Republicans derided Obama’s speech and economic record. The speech was “political response to an economic question… [and] an attempt to distract our attention from the looming financial crisis that we’re capable of handling,” former GOP Rep. Fred Grandy told Fox News.
Obama declined to mention his audience’s new employer, Fiat, which inked a deal last night to buy the last 6 percent of Chrysler’s shares for $500 million. “Soon Chrysler will be 100 percent in private hands, early, faster than anybody believed,” he said.
Fiat is based in Turin, Italy, and earns its money by selling small autos and trucks into the European market. It has had, up to now, very little presence in the US market.
Despite Fiat’s payments, the federal government has not recouped the last $1.4 billion of its Chrysler bailout package.
The president also neglected to mention the three pending free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. He has repeatedly promised industry leaders that he will push the deal through Congress, but White House officials said last month they would not push the deals until the GOP agrees to fund programs that aid workers who lose jobs because of international trade. The trade deals are especially unpopular among the unions, whose extensive get-out-the-vote networks are critical to this 2012 reelection chances.
Obama’s ratings among working-class whites are already well below 50 percent, and the factor workers greeted him “respectfully rather than enthusiastically,” according to the pool reporter who accompanied the president on his tour of the assembly floor.