Taking his jobs message on the road; Obama starts tour with visit to struggling Pa. community
With his popularity slowly eroding as the nation's unemployment rate has risen, President Obama spent Friday reassuring people in Pennsylvania's struggling Lehigh Valley that his administration is focused on stemming the nation's jobs crisis.</br></br>The visit here marked the start of what the White House is calling a Main Street tour, aimed at connecting the president's economic policies to workaday Americans, many of whom feel like they have yet to benefit from them.</br></br>One day after hosting a high-profile jobs forum at the White House, Obama traveled here to visit a job training center and a local pet food plant and to hold a town hall meeting at Lehigh Carbon Community College to discuss his ideas for stemming unemployment and growing the economy.</br></br>During his remarks at the college, Obama struck a populist theme, telling several hundred people packed into a gymnasium that all of his economic policies -- from the financial and auto bailouts to health-care reform -- are aimed at stabilizing the economy and creating jobs. "I didn't [undertake] them because they were popular or gratifying -- they weren't. . . . But I did them because they were necessary to save our country from an even greater catastrophe," he said.</br></br>Obama also said that he planned to summon the nation's top bankers back to the White House this month to press them to loosen credit for small-business owners and others on the front lines of job creation. "And part of what our message to the banks is, the taxpayers were there for you to clean up your mistakes," he said. "You now have a responsibility to be there for the community now that we're bearing the brunt of a lot of these problems that you caused."