President Obama plans a major speech on jobs after Labor Day in which he will lay out new proposals for jump-starting the economy and specific plans for legislative efforts to cut spending, White House officials said.
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown” that the president would lay out two proposals — one to jolt short-term job growth and another to guide the Congressional committee charged with deficit reduction in the fall.
“In early September, we will put forward proposals for jobs-creating ideas and economic growth ideas,” Mr. Carney said Wednesday morning. “We want to be aggressive with deficit reduction that helps pay for things you need to do in the near term to grow the economy.”
A major jobs speech by the president could help set a campaign narrative for Mr. Obama as this Republican challengers increasingly focus their attacks on his handling of the economy. Top aides to the president are eager to show that his ideas are being stymied by a recalcitrant Republican Congress.
“They are more interested in politics than they are in solving the problems,” Mr. Obama told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview Wednesday.
The speech comes amid a growing clamor from the president’s liberal base for him to be more aggressive in pushing his own jobs agenda to counter the conservative debt-cutting philosophy.
And the speech follows repeated criticism from Republicans throughout the debt fight earlier this summer that Mr. Obama has failed to lay out his own plan for turning around the economy.
The White House has said for weeks that the criticism is unfair. Every time the president has spoken publicy recently, he has laid out a series of relatively small proposals that he says Republicans have refused to act on, including trade deals and an extension of the payroll tax cut.
White House officials have said the president’s speech — to be given soon after Labor Day — will contain new ideas that go beyond those he has made in the past several weeks.
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