Obama’s Economic Plea: Patience And Optimism

When it comes to the shaky economy, President Obama is seeking both patience and optimism from voters who will decide his re-election bid next year.

“I’m not concerned about a double-dip recession,” Obama told reporters yesterday at the White House. “I am concerned about the fact that the recovery that we’re on is not producing jobs as quickly as I want it to happen.”

Obama seeks to maintain that balance today by promoting a plan to re-train workers for new manufacturing jobs.

In his speech at Northern Virginia Community College, the president will announced an expansion of “Skills for America’s Future,” a program that seeks to match up industries and community colleges to re-train workers for new jobs.

“Last year, we launched ‘Skills for America’s Future’ to bring together companies and community colleges around a simple idea: Making it easier for workers to gain new skills will make America more competitive in the global economy,” Obama said in a statement provided by the White House.

“Today,” Obama adds, “we are announcing a number of partnerships that will help us make this a reality, by opening doors to new jobs for workers, and helping employers find the trained people they need to compete against companies around the world.”

Obama’s revamped approach comes less than a week after the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate had inched up to 9.1%. That followed a bad report on the manufacturing sector of the economy.

Republicans are using the bad numbers to pound Obama on the economy.

“We need to reduce the regulatory burden and the regulatory uncertainty that’s coming out of Washington,” said House Speaker John Boehner , R-Ohio. “We can’t borrow and spend our way to prosperity.”

In his remarks yesterday, Obama said pointed to long-term trends, saying that the economy has created more than 2 million jobs over the last 15 months, and that there’s been “a rebounding of the manufacturing sector in the United States that’s exemplified by the recovery of the Big Three automakers.”

“But we’ve still got some enormous work to do,” Obama added, promoting some of his policies, including tax cuts, extension of unemployment insurance, education programs, and infrastructure plans.

“We’re going to have some days where things aren’t going as well as we’d like,” Obama said in asking for patience. “There are going to be some times where we’re surprised with better economic data than we expected.”

He added: “We are on the path of a recovery, but it’s got to accelerate. And that’s going to require a continuation of a lot of the steps that I’ve already discussed.”