After tough week, Obama focuses on jobs in speech

ELYRIA, Ohio - President Barack Obama tried to revive his battered agenda and rally despondent Democrats yesterday with a renewed emphasis on jobs. His visit to this struggling Rust Belt city capped a tough first-anniversary week for a presidency that suffered jolts at the hands of Massachusetts voters and the Supreme Court.

"I'm not going to win every round," Obama told a town hall audience. But, striking a populist tone on a campaign-style swing, Obama pledged, "I can promise you there will be more fights in the days ahead."

He used the word "fight" or some variation over a dozen times as he tried out a revamped message focused mainly on the economy, part of a stepped up effort to persuade Americans he's doing all he can to create jobs.

Instead of the anniversary celebration Obama might have expected, the week was one of the worst in recent times for the White House.

The week brought two major shifts to the political landscape. Republican Scott Brown's seizing of the Massachusetts Senate seat held for decades by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy cost Democrats their filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and seriously threatened Obama's entire domestic agenda.

And Thursday's Supreme Court ruling overturning limits on corporate political spending opened the way for businesses and special interests to spend money freely on commercials for or against individual candidates. The opinion could have an impact on this fall's races that could disproportionately work to Democrats' disadvantage.

Republicans sought to capitalize on their Massachusetts windfall by stepping up their attacks on Obama and congressional Democrats. House Minority leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) asserted that his home state "is desperate for a plan to put Americans back to work." But he claimed Obama's health care and climate-change proposals would destroy jobs.