Barack Obama, Economy | featured news

"It took 10 years to get out of the Great Depression," said [Ross] Baker. He said people shouldn't be surprised "if this recovery is half as long..." But, [Nigel] Gault added, "I'm more optimistic that whoever wins the presidency, the next four years will be much better than the past four years."

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.

President Obama is framing his case for re-election by counseling patience for a stronger economy that still may be years away.

Sounding at times like a college lecturer and others like a revival speaker, former President Clinton delivered a thumping endorsement Wednesday night of incumbent Barack Obama, saying his policies were slowly healing the country and would lead to dramatic improvement in a second term.

Why the battle to take credit for Ohio’s ever-so-slightly above-average economy could swing the presidential election...While most of the debate nationally still revolves around why the economy remains so pathetic, there are several pivotal states — Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Virginia — where things are slowly turning around.

President Obama gives himself a grade of "incomplete" on the economy, citing the difficult circumstances he inherited upon taking office in 2009. "Obviously we are still going through one of the toughest times that we've had in my lifetime," Obama told KKTV of Colorado Springs in an interview aired Monday, but he said his policies are helping turn things around.

Democrats say answering the question of whether Americans are better off now than they were four years ago requires some context. Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren tells NBC's "Today" show Tuesday that people should remember how far the economy fell and how hard it is to get back from a time when the stock market was crashing and the auto industry was a mess. She says the real issue is who has the best plan to move forward.

President Obama has a new television ad featuring a testimonial from Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton. In the spot -- which is running in eight swing states -- Clinton casts the Obama-Mitt Romney race as "a clear choice" between two different economic plans.