You can watch President Obama's speech from Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio here. Follow the updates in this post and join the discussion in the comments.
11:25 AM PT: President Obama points to Moody's, who he says has offered an analysis of Romney's economic policy that found it would hurt the economy in the short-term.
11:25 AM PT: "We can't afford to jeopardize our future by repeating the mistakes of the past," Obama said.
11:26 AM PT: "I've got a different vision for the future. I believe you cannot bring down the debt without a strong and growing economy. And I don't believe you can have a strong and growing economy without a strong and growing middle class." (This is crucial, pointing out the best fiscal policy is economic growth.)
11:28 AM PT: Obama is making the case for a future in which we have built the world's best infrastructure and have invested in the energy technologies to fuel our growth. Education, innovation, infrastructure'and a tax code that will achieve balanced deficit reduction.
11:29 AM PT: This vision isn't communism or socialism or anything close. This vision is the vision that made America the economic powerhouse of the world and built the world's greatest and strongest middle-class. And, Obama says, this is the vision he intends to pursue in his second term.
11:33 AM PT: Listening to Obama talk about how he's issues fewer regulations than Bush did in his first three years, and how he doesn't believe in providing government aid to people who refuse to help themselves, I find myself once again shaking my head at my fellow Americans on the right who look at Obama and cannot see the man for who he really is: a middle-of-the-road American president.
11:35 AM PT: Obama is placing himself squarely in the American mainstream. His vision is a shared vision in America, and had been shared across the political spectrum, he says, until the current crop of Republicans'including Mitt Romney'decided that government was the enemy and that the market was everything.
11:40 AM PT: At times, this speech is a repudiation of Mitt Romney's nonstop pattern of lies. Romney in every speech says Obama opposes using any fossil fuels whatsoever. Obama responds that of course he we need to use fossil fuels, pointing out that there has never been more oil drilling than there is now. But we can't depend on them forever. We also need alternative energy sources. We can't afford to not innovate. "Why would we reverse our commitment" to innovation "when it's never been more important?"
11:41 AM PT: "Now is not the time to saddle American businesses with crumbling roads and bridges. Now is the time to rebuild America." Let's take half the money we're no longer spending on war, he says, "and let's do some nation-building here at home."
11:43 AM PT:
The President's ability to speak is worth 8-9 billionaires.— @LOLGOP via TweetDeck
11:46 AM PT: A fair tax code isn't the kind of thing that would hurt the economy, Obama says. Programs like Medicare, don't hurt the economy. What hurts the economy is when middle-class Americans don't have enough money to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling. Demand is the key'supply-siders are wrong.
11:48 AM PT: Obama returns to how he opened the speech. "The only thing that break the stalemate [in DC, between this two visions] is you," Obama says. "You, the people, have the final say. This November is your chance to render a final verdict on how to grow the economy, how to create good jobs, and how to pay down the deficit."
11:48 AM PT: "That's what's really at stake now," Obama says. "Everything else is just noise. Everything else is a distraction."
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