President Barack Obama laid out his vision for America and the middle class Thursday while heralding achievements in health care reform and economic gains during a campaign rally in Jacksonville.
About 3,000 people attended the event at the Osborn Center.
In an almost 30-minute speech, Obama told the crowd he is seeking another four-year term to ensure that gains made during his first term would continue.
He said the financial crisis caused by an “anything goes” Wall Street made his job harder but he “is not discouraged.”
“Ever since I first ran for this office, I have said that it is going to take more than one year, or one term or maybe even (more than) one president to restore the dream that built this country,” Obama said.
Obama was in Jacksonville as part of a two-day tour across the state to discuss the November election and the difference between “two fundamentally different visions of how to grow the economy, create middle-class jobs and pay down the debt,” according to his campaign.
“What’s standing in our way is politics,” he said.
He threw barbs at his opponent, Republican Mitt Romney, by
disputing top-down economics through cutting regulations for banks and taxes for the rich.
“This country was built from the middle-class up. It was built from the bottom up. That’s how we became the most prosperous nation in the history of the world,” Obama said.
Before his appearance, Obama named two Jacksonville Port Authority projects to a list of seven priority infrastructure projects and pledged to accelerate the federal review process, according to a news release.
First, the Jacksonville Harbor Navigation Deepening Study to dredge the port for post-Panamax cargo will be completed next April, a year ahead of schedule.
Second, he pledged to speed up the federal review process for the port’s Intermodal Container Transfer Facility Project to be completed by July 2013. The $30 project will increase the capacity of the port to move containers by on-dock rail, which would cut traffic and increase efficiency.
Both are now part of Obama’s “We Can’t Wait” initative, but he did not mention the plans during his campaign rally.
While Obama championed economic success across the U.S. as a whole, a U.S. Metro Economies Report released Thursday shows the city’s gross metropolitan product, measured at $60.9 billion, was up $1.5 billion in 2011.
The report about the nation’s metro economies was unveiled at the U.S. Conference of Mayors Leadership Meeting in Philadelphia.
Jacksonville ranks as the 47th largest metro economy in the U.S. and 117th largest globally, according to a news release about the report.
“These numbers represent the tremendous momentum that’s leading us to even better days ahead,” said Mayor Alvin Brown in the release.
Brown did not attend Obama’s rally because he was at the mayors’ conference meeting.
356-2466