Obama: "We Need To Do What ... Clinton Did In The 1990s"
ABINGTON, PA – Barack Obama applauded his running mate’s performance in last night’s debate before discussing the latest job numbers and bashing his Republican rival on the economy.
In a speech before a some 6,000 people gathered at a windy high school football stadium in a Philadelphia suburb, the Democratic nominee highlighted Joe Biden’s Pennsylvania roots, telling the crowd he was a “Scranton boy done good” who had showed America why he would be such a good vice president. Obama talked about what he called a “noteworthy” moment from the St. Louis match up between Biden and Sarah Palin: when the governor said the Democrats’ economy 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 today that his economic policies would create millions of new jobs, including five million clean energy jobs and two million jobs in infrastructure and repeated a common attack line he and Biden uses to cast McCain as out of touch, saying that only two weeks 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 and Abington, I am here to tell you that we cannot afford four more years of this,” he said. “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 senator painted John 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.
(NBC/NJ's ATHENA JONES)
Join the Discussion
The National Journal Group has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate.
Comments powered by Disqus