Barack Obama, Economy | featured news

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.

In Obama's Last Stand, author Glenn Thrush of Politico writes that Obama has told aides "that Romney stood for 'nothing,' " and would use the word "weak" to describe the GOP candidate.

“We tried our plan — and it worked. That’s the difference. That’s the choice in this election. That’s why I’m running for a second term.” ...In any case, the Romney campaign clearly ripped these words out of context, leaving them untethered from their original meaning — in order to score political points in a highly misleading way. Obama was not talking about today’s economy, but about different philosophies of taxation.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Mitt Romney, released a new radio ad Friday knocking President Barack Obama for his handling of the economy and calling into question the Obama campaign's repeated attacks on Romney and Bain Capital. The new spot, titled "Imagine," is part of a $1 million radio ad campaign and will air from July 27 to Aug. 2 across swing states Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

President Obama and aides will again have to defend their economic policy amid more tepid data... Alan Krueger, who chairs Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, noted that the Gross Domestic Product -- the total amount of goods and services produced in the country -- has grown for a dozen straight quarters, adding up to 6.7% over the past three years.

Nationally, the economic picture is decidedly dismal — a sullen state of affairs that has led many political observers to conclude that President Obama is an underdog in his bid for a second term.
But in the 12 (or so) swing states — where Democrats and Republicans will spend the lion’s share of their time and money in the 100 or so days between now and Nov. 6 — the economic picture is considerably sunnier.

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."

President Obama says Mitt Romney's business experience doesn't qualify him for the presidency because it was about making money, not creating jobs. "If you're a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money," Obama told CBS News. "It's not to create jobs. It's not even to create a successful business -- it's to make sure that you're maximizing returns for your investor."

President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered a series of modest steps aimed at helping small businesses, his latest election-year effort to counter Republican attacks on his economic record and show voters he is trying to tackle high unemployment.

The president can sink Romney by trumpeting the details of the ludicrous economic solutions he’s been backing. How Mitt would turn America into one big Pottersville... Romney is Bush on steroids. His tax plan is far more extreme. He wants to give millionaires an average—average!—tax cut of $250,000. The same plan would add $3 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Haven’t we tried this before, and didn’t it help lead—along with massive deregulation, which Romney also promises to pursue—to the biggest meltdown in 80 years?