WASHINGTON — House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan yesterday accused President Obama of using his doomed jobs bill to “create political ruckus” instead of honestly working to create jobs.
“He put ideas in this jobs bill that have already proven to fail. Instead of trying to get compromise, he’s embracing conflict,” Ryan (R-Wis.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“He’s running around the country campaigning on a bill that he knows won’t pass,” Ryan said. “What we‘re getting is a campaign from the White House trying to create political ruckus.”
Obama is poised to make the bill’s defeat the centerpiece of his re-election campaign, lambasting Republicans for siding with the rich against his jobs bill.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, said the president’s record will outshine the Republican challenger in 2012, singling out GOP front-runner Mitt Romney for comparison.
“There would not be an auto industry if Mitt Romney was president. He would have said, ‘Let it go bankrupt,’ ” Emanuel said.
Emanuel said that Obama’s plan for more infrastructure projects in the jobs bill would be an “engine” for economic growth similar to the space race in the 1960s or the Internet boom in the 1990s.
“Have [the unemployed] rebuild our schools. Have them rebuild our roads, because we have a 21st-century economy sitting on a 20th-century infrastructure,” he said. “That should be the reinvention engine like NASA was, like the Internet was at different moments in time, and we will be a stronger, more productive economy for that rebuilding of America.”
Still, Emanuel conceded that Obama must shoulder some of the blame for the country’s miserable economy and face a tough re-election fight.
“There’s no doubt there’s a challenge politically because the economy is not where the American middle-class family needs it to be for their bottom line,” he said.
The $447 billion jobs bill has a slim chance of surviving a vote tomorrow in the Democrat-led Senate. But it has virtually no shot in the Republican-led House.
The bill includes an extended payroll-tax holiday, aid to states to hire firefighters and teachers, and new spending to rebuild roads, bridges and schools.
It is paid for with a surtax of 5.6 percent on millionaires, a provision added by Senate Democratic leaders to attract more support from fellow Democrats.
Republicans argue that it is a rehash of the failed 2009 stimulus spending and that tax hikes will hurt the fragile economy.
Obama has crisscrossed the country for the past month campaigning for the jobs bill.
The president held a press conference Thursday to tout the bill and made it the focus of his weekend radio address, trying to ratchet up pressure on Senate Republicans ahead of Tuesday’s vote.