Obama slams McCain with jobs report
Posted: Friday, October 03, 2008 1:39 PM by Carrie Dann
From NBC/NJ's Athena Jones
ABINGTON, Pa. -- Barack Obama applauded his running mate’s performance in last night’s debate, saying that the "Scranton boy done good" and contrasting his rival's positions in the debate with the latest job numbers.
In a speech before some 6,000 people gathered at a windy high school football stadium in a Philadelphia suburb, Obama mentioned a “noteworthy” moment from the St. Louis match up between Biden and Sarah Palin: when the governor said the Democrats’ economic policy would kill jobs.
“I wonder if she turned on the news this morning, because it was just reported that America has experienced its ninth straight month of job loss,” he said.
America has lost more than three quarters of a million jobs since January, and Obama is hoping to convince concerned voters that a vote for his ticket is a vote for more jobs. He said his economic policies would create millions of new jobs, including five million in clean energy technology and two million in infrastructure. He repeated a common attack line that he and Biden use to cast McCain as out of touch, saying that only two weeks ago the Arizona senator was still saying the fundamentals of the economy were strong.
”When Sen. McCain and his running mate talk about job killing, that’s something they know a thing or two about, because the policies they’ve supported and are supporting are killing jobs in America every single day," he said.
"I am here to tell you that we cannot afford four more years of this,” he added. “We need to do what we did in the 1990s and create millions of new jobs and not lose them. We need to do what we did in the 1990s and make sure people’s incomes are going up and not down. We need to do what a guy named Bill Clinton did in the 1990s and put people first again.”
The Republican National Committee responded in a statement calling Obama's economic plan "dangerous."
"Unlike John McCain, Barack Obama thinks the answer to our nation’s struggling economy is to kill job creation with higher taxes and oppose competitive tax rates that would keep jobs here in America," said RNC spokeswoman Amber Wilkerson. "As our nation faces an economic crisis, America’s middle class deserves a President who will implement real reform in Washington and lead our economy back on track – not Barack Obama’s dangerous proposals that will obstruct job creation and grow the size of Washington’s bureaucracy
Today, Obama continued to paint McCain as a deregulator who was trying to change his stripes, even comparing him to Civil Rights leader and former Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson. For 26 years, McCain has been for deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, Obama said.
”He hasn’t been getting tough on CEOs. He hasn’t been getting tough on Wall Street, so suddenly a crisis comes and the polls change and suddenly he’s out there talking like Jesse Jackson,” he said. “Come on. It shows how out of touch he really is.”
After the event, Obama was headed home to Chicago to celebrate his 16th wedding anniversary before hitting the trail again Saturday in Virginia. He plans to spend several days, starting tomorrow evening, in Asheville, NC, preparing for the next presidential debate.
