Obama to promote jobs plan in Boehner's home state

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama on Tuesday is visiting Ohio, the home state of Republican House Speaker John Boehner, to build public support for his jobs bill that he wants to pay for by raising taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations.

The visit to a school undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation in Columbus, Ohio, is designed to promote $25 billion in school modernization and infrastructure spending that's part of the $447 billion jobs bill Obama sent Monday to Congress.

Boehner's congressional district is farther west, but Obama will be in Republican territory in a key swing state for the 2012 presidential election. Boehner's office had no comment on Obama's visit.

By daring Republicans anew to reject the tax increases on rich Americans and corporations, Obama could gain a talking point as the 2012 presidential campaign moves forward, if not a legislative victory.

There stakes are high in the jobs plan battle as Obama faces a tough re-election fight with the economy stalled, unemployment stuck at 9.1 percent and polls showing deep public unhappiness with his leadership on the economy.

Some Democrats have grown frustrated by what they see as Obama buckling to Republicans in talks on taxes and spending rather than fighting to maintain key safety net programs long favored by his party.

But the jobs plan has brought out a more combative Obama. Flanked at the White House by workers he said the legislation would help, Obama declared Monday, "This is the bill that Congress needs to pass. No games. No politics. No delays." He sent it to Capitol Hill saying, "The only thing that's stopping it is politics."

The president's proposal drew criticism from House Speaker John Boehner, who had previously responded in cautious but somewhat receptive tones to the jobs plan that includes payroll tax cuts for workers and employers and new spending that Obama first proposed in an address to Congress last Thursday.

"It would be fair to say this tax increase on job creators is the kind of proposal both parties have opposed in the past. We remain eager to work together on ways to support job growth, but this proposal doesn't appear to have been offered in that bipartisan spirit," Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said.

Obama would pay for his plan by getting nearly $400 billion in revenue from limiting the tax deductions on charitable contributions and other items that wealthy people can take, and there's also $40 billion from closing oil and gas loopholes, $18 billion from hiking taxes on certain income made by fund managers, and $3 billion from changing the tax treatment of corporate jets.

At the White House event, Obama told of reading a quotation in a newspaper article from a Republican congressional aide who questioned why Republicans should work with Obama since the result might just be to help the president politically. "That was very explicit," Obama said.

Buck, the Boehner spokesman, said the anonymous quote cited by the president didn't reflect the view of Republican leadership.

And even as Obama was accusing Republicans of playing politics, he and his Democratic allies were marshaling an aggressive political response of their own with trips to Ohio on Tuesday, and following that with a trip Wednesday to North Carolina, a traditionally Republican state he won in 2008.

He was getting backup from the Democratic National Committee, which announced a television ad campaign starting Monday to promote Obama's jobs plans in key swing and early-voting states and to call on voters to pressure their lawmakers for support.

The jobs package would combine tax cuts for workers and employers by reducing the Social Security payroll tax, with spending elements including more money to hire teachers, rebuild schools and pay unemployment benefits. There are also tax credits to encourage businesses to hire veterans and the long-term unemployed.

The White House, which has gotten burned in the past by making overly optimistic job-creation predictions, has avoided estimating how many jobs the package would create. But in an interview Monday on NBC News, Obama embraced an estimate from an outside economist, Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, and said the bill "could mean an additional 2 million jobs."

White House Budget Director Jacob Lew said that Obama will also include those tax proposals in a broader debt-cutting package he plans to submit next week to a congressional "supercommittee" charged with finding $1.2 trillion in savings later this year. He said that the supercommittee would have the option of accepting the payment mechanisms for the jobs bill proposed by Obama, or proposing new ones.

Republicans have indicated they're receptive to supporting Obama's proposed payroll tax cut and finding a way to extend unemployment benefits, though many have rejected Obama's planned new spending. Obama's new proposal Monday to pay for it all by raising taxes without any proposals to cut spending is unlikely to win him any new Republican support for any element of his plan.

"I sure hope that the president is not suggesting that we pay for his proposals with a massive tax increase at the end of 2012 on job creators that we're actually counting on to reduce unemployment," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.