At a campaign event at the Bellagio in Las Vegas last night, President Obama attacked Republicans, blaming them for the failure of his state bailout bill, a piece of his $447 billion stimulus that the Senate voted down last week.

The president complained, “The question is, why, despite all the support — despite all the experts who say this jobs bill couldn’t come at a more important time, when so many people are hurting — why the Republicans in Washington have said no? They keep voting against it.”  Of course, the opposition to the president’s bill last week was bipartisan. And several Democrats went out to their way to make their opposition to the bill known. Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) said, [W]hen you look at the president’s jobs act, even if you break it down to bite-sized pieces, it’s spending money we don’t have, and you got to raise taxes to pay for it . . . .” Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) said, “If I didn’t think much of it on the one thing, you’ve got to assume that I won’t think much of it for something else … I don’t think you increase taxes for new spending.” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) lamented, “We have to be responsible, and basically if spending money would fix our problems in America, we’d have no problems.” And Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) said, “It’s a little philosophical in the sense that I’m not sure federal taxpayers should be paying for teachers and first responders. That’s traditionally a state and local matter . . . .”

At his campaign event, President Obama claimed, “we could have saved 400,000 jobs” by passing his bailout bill. But the nearly $1 trillion stimulus in 2009 and another $26 billion bill in 2010 were also supposed to “save” hundreds of thousands of jobs for the same group of people. The president claimed the stimulus would “help prevent our states and local communities from laying off firefighters, and teachers, and police.” Less than 4 months after Democrats passed his massive stimulus bill, Obama was claiming, “We’ve created and saved, as you said, Joe, at least 150,000 Jobs – jobs of teachers and nurses and firefighters and police officers. People who had been laid off are not being laid off . . . .” And yet the following year, the president and Democrats pushed through a multi-billion bill they claimed would save 300,000 jobs. Then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said it was “a very important proposal, particularly to ensure that 160,000-plus teachers didn’t get fired as a result of bad state budgets.” And Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claimed, “There is no doubt about it, if we fail to pass this bill, hundreds of thousands of teachers and firefighters will lose their jobs.” Both bills passed, but now the president is saying another 400,000 jobs are at risk despite that? If the last two didn’t work, why would doing the same thing again change the outcome?

The president also claimed his bill was about “saving the jobs of teachers and cops and firefighters,” but Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) worried last week, “I’m all for individual states making smart choices with their own money, but giving them federal money and just hoping they’ll use it for education and teachers – well, that’s not good enough.” And in fact, news reports show the last couple of Democrat spending bills that were supposed to save education jobs resulted in school districts buying iPads, laptops, tickets for movies and water parks, and even had funds diverted to prisons.

Related:

Rasmussen Reports:Generic Congressional Ballot: Republicans 44%, Democrats 36%

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