The legislation, announced with fanfare by the president at a joint session of Congress last month, fell short of the 60 needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate.
The vote in favor of advancing the bill on Tuesday was 50 to 49. Two moderate Democrats facing difficult re-election campaigns, Senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jon Tester of Montana, joined a solid phalanx of Republicans in opposition. In addition, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, switched from yes to no so that he could move to reconsider the vote in the future.
Given Mr. Obama’s repeated demands, as he traveled the nation in recent weeks, that Congress pass the bill intact, the Senate’s vote to block the measure represented a significant setback and came after leaders of his own party had adjusted the measure to include a surtax on incomes of more than $1 million to round up additional Democratic votes.
After the vote, the president criticized Republicans for balking at a measure that included initiatives they supported in the past.
“Tonight’s vote is by no means the end of this fight,” the president said in a statement. He added, “In the coming days, members of Congress will have to take a stand on whether they believe we should put teachers, construction workers, police officers and firefighters back on the job.”
Votes on pieces of the bill could begin this month, perhaps as early as next week, Senate Democratic aides said. Party leaders said they needed to consult their caucus before they decided on the timing or chose the provisions to be considered separately.
Several Democratic senators said they might join a handful of Republicans in searching for job-creation proposals that could gain bipartisan support — a formidable challenge in a chamber where comity seems to worsen by the week.
House Republican leaders have said they do not intend to take up the president’s bill as a whole. But they welcomed the signal from the White House that the administration would be open to a piecemeal effort.
The House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, said he hoped “the president will drop his all-or-nothing approach and begin to work with us on areas of commonality,” including initiatives that could promote hiring and economic growth.
“We are willing to take up the things we can agree on,” Mr. Cantor said.
The president’s bill is a mix of public works spending and temporary tax cuts intended to respond to what Mr. Obama calls an economic crisis and an emergency. Senate Democrats tried to make the president’s bill more palatable by adding a surtax of 5.6 percent, starting in 2013, on income in excess of $1 million.
As the Senate moved toward a vote Tuesday, Mr. Reid made an accusation heard with increasing frequency from Democrats: Republicans were opposing the president’s jobs bill because, for political reasons, they wanted the economy to remain in bad shape.
“Republicans think that if the economy improves, it might help President Obama,” Mr. Reid said. “So they root for the economy to fail and oppose every effort to improve it.”
The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, replied in kind. “Democrats have designed this bill to fail — they’ve designed their own bill to fail — in the hope that anyone who votes against it will look bad,” Mr. McConnell said. “This whole exercise is a charade that’s meant to give Democrats a political edge in an election that’s 13 months away.”
Senate Democratic leaders said the vote Tuesday showed that a majority of the Senate — 51 senators, including Mr. Reid — wanted to take up the bill.
Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Pittsburgh, and Mark Landler from Washington.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 12, 2011
An earlier version of this article used the wrong unit of measurement for the Labor Department’s measure of nonfarm payroll employment. It recorded 131.3 million people in September, compared with 132.8 million in February 2009, not those respective quantities in dollars.
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