On Thursday, President Barack Obama rallied House Democrats around the healthcare bill and an economy that he says will improve as they head into a midterm election campaign.
Obama said that the legislation Congress passed since he became president is moving the economy forward and that Republican opposition to the healthcare bill will buoy Democrats in November.
“Let me tell you something, if Republicans want to campaign against something by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over families and businesses, that is a fight I want to have,” Obama said.
“If their best idea is to return to the bad policies and the bad ideas of yesterday, they are going to lose that argument,” he added.
Obama spoke before the entire House Democratic Caucus in the Capitol as part of the Democrats’ jobs summit. The president and the caucus’s leaders said that the economy is in better shape than it was when Obama took office almost exactly a year ago, and that they’ll take more steps to create jobs with the unemployment rate now at 9.7 percent.
“Thanks to what you did, we can say now what we could not say a year ago,” Obama said. “America is moving forward again.”
The president’s speech launched several salvos at Republicans that Democrats will likely echo in the 2010 campaign. House Democrats are trying to buck historical trends in retaining a large House majority despite holding the White House at the same time.
Obama said that stimulus investments in education, new regulations on to protect consumers from credit card companies, a bill helping women seek for equal pay as male colleagues and other legislation passed in 2009 has helped the country move in a new direction after the Bush administration.
Image: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president-obama
