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EMPORIA, Va. (AP) — President Barack Obama sought Tuesday to recapture some of the bipartisan appeal that helped get him elected, while using the opportunity to assail GOP lawmakers for blocking his jobs bill. "I'm everybody's president," he said.
Appearing in politically important North Carolina and Virginia to promote his economic measures and his re-election, Obama promised he would work with GOP lawmakers on any serious idea they present to create jobs at a time of high unemployment.
"I'm not the Democratic president. I'm not the Republican president. I'm everybody's president," Obama told a supportive audience at a high school in Emporia, Va.
Obama made a similar pitch earlier Tuesday in North Carolina, echoing his 2008 campaign trail refrain about America being the "United States" and not a collection of red and blue states.
Bipartisan rhetoric aside, Obama has had few discussions with the GOP about the $447 billion jobs bill that Senate Republicans blocked last week. The bill is being broken up so Congress can vote on its individual components.
Obama said the larger bill may have been "confusing" for Senate Republicans.
"We got 100 percent 'no' from Republicans in the Senate," Obama said. "Now that doesn't make any sense."
The top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, in turn accusing Obama of accepting that the economy won't improve significantly by Election Day and trying to blame anyone but himself for it. McConnell said the public is smarter than that and will figure it out.
"The president I think has become convinced that the economy is not likely to be much better a year from now. So he has started the campaign 13 months early and he's trying to convince the American people that it's anybody else's fault but his that we're where we are," McConnell said in Washington. "It must be the fault of those Republicans in Congress. It must be the fault of those rich people. It must be the fault of those people on Wall Street."
"I don't think the American people are going to fall for it. He's been the president now for three years," McConnell added.
The White House denies Obama is on a campaign trip. But immediately after his earlier remarks in Jamestown, N.C., he president climbed aboard his sleek, million-dollar, Secret Service-approved black bus for the five-hour ride to Emporia, Va., his final stop of the day.
Before crossing into Virginia, Obama stopped at Reid's House in Reidsville, N.C., and the diverse crowd cheered loudly as Obama entered the restaurant for lunch.
He worked the room, chatting with one local couple who said they'd been married 59 years and joking that he and his wife, Michelle, had 40 years to go to catch up. He even complimented a resident who said he worked in the funeral business, exclaiming, "Fantastic, that's important work!"
Obama is on the second day of a three-day tour through North Carolina and Virginia that is giving him a chance to sit back, admire the colorful fall foliage and bask in some small-town Southern hospitality — in addition to pounding on his Republican opponents.
"There's just something about North Carolina," he said Tuesday. "People are just gracious and kind. Even the folks who don't vote for me are nice to me." He recalled stopping for barbecue, sweet tea and hush puppies and playfully admonished the audience not to tell his health-conscious wife what he's been eating.
The stated purpose of the trip was to continue pushing the jobs bill. But Obama is also selling himself, trying to pump up voters whose enthusiasm may have waned. That's particularly important in North Carolina, a state he wrested from Republicans in 2008 but that could slip from his grasp in November 2012.
To try to recapture some of his past appeal, Obama resorted to the retail politics often missing from the highly scripted White House.
Obama took his lunch of a cheeseburger, fries and sweet tea aboard his "decked out" bus and made a few unscheduled stops during the drive into Virginia along twisty backcountry roads past grain silos and fields of hay bales.
He visited a high school computer lab in Skipwith, Va., where he saw a robotics demonstration and students asked whether he knew singer Justin Bieber. (He said he did, describing Bieber as "a very nice young man"). Obama also stopped in Brodnax, Va., to greet children who were sitting outside a child care center on little chairs.
Obama's unscheduled stops aren't wholly impromptu. White House staffers typically scope out areas in advance and Secret Service officers arrive well ahead of him. But they are about as spontaneous as it gets for the president.
