Politics
Obama: GOP leader, GOP blocks jobs vote
It underscored Obama’s dilemma as he travels the country seeking to isolate Republicans to take the blame if his jobs bill doesn’t pass, without a clear strategy for ensuring it does.
The approach puts the Obama administration at risk of appearing to use the president’s US$447 billion jobs bill as a political weapon rather than as a means of fixing the nation’s economic woes and putting Americans back to work.
And it relies heavily on the assumption that the public won’t also hold Obama accountable if he can’t get Congress to act.
Obama spoke a day after Cantor, R-Va., said that while the plan contained elements that Republicans could support, “this all or nothing approach is unreasonable.”
Cantor’s spokesman, Brad Dayspring, disputed Obama’s criticism.
“If House Republicans sent our plan for America’s job creators to the president, would he promise not to veto it in its entirety? Would he travel district to district and explain why he’d block such common-sense ideas to create jobs?” Dayspring asked. “House Republicans have different ideas on how to grow the economy and create jobs, but that shouldn’t prevent us from trying to find areas of common ground with the president.”
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
