Obama: I accept the responsibility
Posted: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 5:08 PM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
White House, Economy, Barack Obama
From NBC's Athena Jones
WARREN, Mich. -- President Obama had a message for Republican critics who want to pin the country’s current economic woes on him: “That’s fine. Give it to me.”
With the nation’s unemployment rate near 9.5% -- a 26-year high -- Obama has come under increasing fire from detractors on the right, who say the massive $787 billion stimulus has done little to create jobs.
In a speech to a cheering crowd of more than 1,500 people, who waited for several hours in the hot sun at Macomb Community College to hear him speak, Obama said it was his administration’s job to get the economy back on its feet.
“It’s a job I gladly accept,” he said to applause. “I love these folks who helped get us in this mess. And then suddenly say, ‘Oh, this is Obama’s economy.’ That’s fine. Give it to me. My job is to solve problems -- not to stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe. So I welcome the job. I want the responsibility.”
Video: Speaking at the White House, President Obama says he has seen some economic stabilization, but remains concerned over the high levels of unemployment.
The event had the distinct feel of a campaign rally; in fact, Obama spoke at this site during the long slog to November’s presidential election. Today, he seemed to draw energy from the enthusiastic crowd, adding long, ad-libbed riffs throughout a short speech introducing his plan to help strengthen community colleges with $12 billion in federal aid over the next decade.
After tackling the economy broadly, Obama went on to defend his administration’s extraordinary intervention to help struggling auto giants General Motors and Chrysler earlier this year, and he repeated his pitch to overhaul the health-care system, which he says is key to reducing the skyrocketing deficit.
Ed Montgomery, the White House’s director of recovery for auto communities and workers, Michigan Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, and Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow were on hand for the event in this state where the unemployment rate is 14.1%. In fact, Michigan has been so hard hit by the economic crisis that the reverend who delivered the prayer before the event began even cited a study on joblessness in Michigan and said it was likely to get worse.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force that Michigan was one of the top-10 recipients of stimulus money. Still, Obama’s opponents were ready on the ground, using local media to attack his spending plans.
“We said when Obama first proposed this spending explosion that it was the wrong way to stimulate the economy,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Dave Camp (R-MI) wrote in an op-ed in today’s The Detroit News. “That is now fact.” *** CORRECTION *** That line was from a Detroit News editorial, not the op-ed by Boehner and Camp.
Even as he took ownership of the economic crisis today, Obama reminded his audience that it was one he had inherited. “The road to recovery, the road to prosperity is going to be hard. It was never going to be easy,” he said as he closed his speech.
He went on to say that when he was sworn in, the country was losing 700,000 jobs a month -- a pace that continued for two more months. “Now we've got an average of about 400,000 jobs lost, but we're still losing too many jobs,” he said. “We will get to the point where we're not losing jobs. But then we've got to start getting to the point where we're actually creating jobs. And it's going to take time. There are going to be false -- false starts, and there are going to setbacks. But I am confident that we can meet the challenges we face, because that's what we've always done.”
Help for community colleges
Also in his speech, Obama tied the economy to education and help for community colleges. In his February address to a joint session of Congress, the president said he wanted America to lead the world in the proportion of college graduates by 2020, and today he said he hoped to see 5 million additional community college graduates by then. There are some 6 million people currently enrolled in community colleges across the country, according to administration officials
“Community colleges are an essential part of our recovery in the present and our prosperity in the future,” Obama said.
The Obama plan, which would have to be approved by Congress, would devote $9 billion to helping schools improve their graduation rates, coordinate with employers on curriculum and internships, increase opportunities for dual enrollment at high schools and universities, make it easier to transfer credits, offer performance-based scholarships, counseling and remedial education and help states develop systems to track student progress. Some $2.5 billion would go toward helping finance school renovations and another $500,000 would fund the development of online courses.
“Now, I know that for a long time there have been politicians who have spoken of training as a silver bullet and college as a cure-all. It’s not, and we know that,” he said. “But we know that in the coming years, jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience. We will not fill those jobs -- or even keep those jobs here in America -- without the training offered by community colleges.”
Still, lawmakers may bristle at devoting more money to the president’s programs, given a deficit for this fiscal year that has already topped $1 trillion –- a record -- and is expected to reach nearly double that.
After the Michigan event, the president was headed to St. Louis to follow in the footsteps of his presidential predecessors by throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at tonight's Major League Baseball All-Star game.
