Job data boosts Obama’s re-election argument

10, Mar.AFP

President Barack Obama declared Friday that America "will thrive again" as the US economy created some 200,000 jobs for a third straight month, in a new boost to his reelection bid.

Obama traveled to a Rolls Royce engineering plant in the general election swing state of Virginia to fete the rebound in manufacturing and argue that his oft-criticized economic policies had underpinned the recovery.

"We will thrive again. We will get to where we need to go, and we will leave behind an economy that is built to last," Obama said, injecting a note of pure politics into what had been billed as a routine official event.

"We will make this another American century."

Perceptions of a quickening recovery were fueled by Labor Department figures showing the economy created a net 227,000 jobs in February. The jobless rate was steady at 8.3 percent.

"The economy is getting stronger. When I come to places like this and I see the work that is being done, it gives me confidence for better days ahead," Obama said, laying claim to have created a total of four million jobs.

Obama's choice of Virginia to deliver his message was no coincidence. He became the first Democrat to win the traditionally southern state since the 1960s in the 2008 election and is targeting it again in November.

As protocol triggered political irony, Obama was greeted at the airport by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican who has been mentioned as a possible candidate for his party's vice presidential nod.

Obama aides and independent analysts believe that if Obama could rebuild his coalition of affluent middle-class voters, the young and African Americans, he could again capture Virginia en route to victory in November.

The Rolls Royce plant, which makes engine discs for Airbus A380 aircraft and the new Boeing Dreamliner jet, is a case study in the rebuilding and innovative economy Obama hopes to highlight.

The firm has added 150 jobs at the Virginia plant and will shortly create 140 more at another nearby facility, and employs more than 7,700 people in its pioneering hi-tech work in the United States.

During his visit, Obama unveiled a new one billion dollar plan to create a network of 15 institutes of manufacturing innovation around the United States.

Despite strongly trumpeting his economic policies, including a controversial decision to bail out ailing auto firms in 2009, Obama was careful to avoid an overly triumphal note on the new jobs figures.

That may reflect fears among his campaign team that a combination of rising gasoline prices and outside turbulence could limit economic expansion later this year and slow the job creation engine.

Every monthly release of jobs data from now until the election will be a highly politicized event and will cause sleepless nights in the West Wing of the White House.

"We've got a lot of work to do before everybody who wants a good job can find one, before middle-class folks regain that sense of security that had been slipping away even before the recession hit," Obama said.

The president also argued however that a return to Republican economic policies would risk igniting the same conditions that unleashed the economic meltdown in the final months of George W. Bush's presidency. Republicans have been using the elevated unemployment rate to argue that Obama's record on the economy should disqualify him from securing a second term in November's election.

But Friday's figures, confirming the third straight month of jobs growth of more than 200,000 also, left Obama's opponents in a delicate spot, between welcoming an improving economy and criticizing the president.

"Any new job is a welcome paycheck for the American worker, but as past recoveries show, the current rate of growth will leave the American economy sputtering for years to come," said Republican White House hopeful Newt Gingrich.

The former House speaker said that gasoline prices rising to nearly four dollars a gallon on average were crimping growth and accused Obama of hobbling a true recovery by failing to expand domestic oil drilling.

Current House speaker John Boehner said the jobs figures were a "testament to the "hard work and entrepreneurship of the American people" not Obama, who he accused of pursuing an "onslaught of anti-business policies."