Barack Obama, U.s. Economy | featured news

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.

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.

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.