OBAMA RALLIES HIS PARTY TO PUSH ON
Addressing the annual winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee, President Obama said Saturday that the Democratic Party should not simply "regroup, lick our wounds and try to hang on" during a challenging political season, pledging to press forward this year to deliver results on health care and job creation measures. "I know we've gone through a tough year," Obama told party advocates, "but we've gone through tougher years."
The president also renewed his call to find a way forward on his health care agenda, and he did not rule out scaling back the scope of the legislation in hopes of drawing more support.
"Just in case there's any confusion out there, I am not going to walk away from health care reform," Obama said, offering no specifics for how he intended to deliver on his pledge. "I'm not going to walk away on this challenge. I'm not going to walk away on any challenge. We're moving forward."
PARTIES SPAR OVER JOB CREATION PLANS
Republicans sparred with President Obama in their Saturday media addresses over proposals to create jobs, further evidence of the difficulty of bipartisan solutions to the nation's pressing problems.
Obama pushed Congress to use $30 billion that had been set aside to bail out Wall Street to start a new program to provide loans to small businesses, which the White House calls the engine for job growth. Republicans, meanwhile, taunted Obama with a familiar refrain: Where are the jobs the president promised in exchange for the billions of dollars already spent?
The barb came a day after the government reported an unexpected decline in the unemployment rate, from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. It was the first drop in seven months but offered little comfort over the 8.4 million jobs that have vanished since the recession began.
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