Barack Obama, Jobs | featured news

President Obama said Friday that the job growth reflected in the latest employment report is “not good enough” but suggested things would get better quicker if Congress would cooperate.

The economy added only 96,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported this morning; Republicans quickly pounced on the slow job growth, the morning after the Democrats wrapped up their convention in Charlotte.

U.S. employers added 96,000 jobs last month, a weak figure that could slow any momentum President Barack Obama hoped to gain from his speech to the Democratic National Convention. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent from 8.3 percent in July, but only because more people gave up looking for work. The government only counts people as unemployed if they are actively searching.

Actually, it’s not the economy. At least not this week. A presidential campaign that Republicans wanted to be focused relentlessly on President Obama’s job-creation record seems to be about almost everything else at the moment. In part that’s the result of a monthslong effort by the Obama campaign to shift attention to Mitt Romney’s wealth and business record.

President Barack Obama blasted Mitt Romney's economic plan during a stop in the pivotal swing state of Ohio on Monday, saying the blueprint will create 800,000 jobs — just not in America. "Today, we found out, there's a new study out by a non-partisan economist that says Governor Romney's economic plan would in fact create 800,000 jobs," Obama said at a town hall-style event in Cincinnati. "There's only one problem. The jobs wouldn't be in America."

If high unemployment "was a killer, he'd already be dead," said Republican pollster and consultant Mike McKenna. "The survey data tells you he's not dead." There's a problem with applying historical precedents and conventional wisdom to Obama. He sometimes defies them.

"[B]usinesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months," the president said, "including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs. That’s a step in the right direction. That’s a step in the right direction. But we can’t be satisfied, because our goal was never to just keep on working to get back where we were back in 2007, and I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get to the middle class have some basic security. That’s our goal.”

The attack is the latest iteration of President Obama’s attempts to demonize Mitt Romney over his tenure at Bain Capital.

President Obama ripped Mitt Romney today over a report that the Republican's private equity firm invested in companies that moved jobs out of the United States to low-wage countries. "We do not need an outsourcing pioneer in the Oval Office," Obama said during a fundraising speech in Tampa, Fla. "We need a president who will fight for American jobs."

Romney's record, charging him with raising taxes and shipping jobs overseas while he was governor of Massachusetts... CNN reports these new Obama ads will run in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada.