Senate rejects slimmed-down Obama jobs bill

WASHINGTON - Despite a campaign-style push this week by President Barack Obama, the Senate on Thursday scuttled pared-back jobs legislation aimed at helping state and local governments avoid layoffs of teachers and firefighters.

Obama's three-day bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia — states crucial to his re-election race next year — didn't change any minds among Senate Republicans, who killed Obama's latest jobs measure with delaying tactics just as they killed his broader $447 billion jobs plan last week.

Thursday's $35 billion measure combined $30 billion for state and local governments to hire teachers and other school workers with $5 billion to help pay the salaries of police officers, firefighters and other first responders. The White House says the measure would "support" almost 400,000 education jobs for one year. Republicans call that a temporary "sugar high" for the economy.

Despite the negative vote, Obama and his Democratic allies are acting like they've found a winning issue in repeatedly pressing popular ideas such as infrastructure spending and boosting hiring of police officers and firefighters. The sluggish economy and lower tax revenues have caused many teachers' jobs to be cut over the past several years.

After the failure of the jobs measure last week, Democrats vowed to try to resurrect it on a piece by piece basis, even though the strategy doesn't seem to have any better chance of success. But Democrats are trying to win a political advantage through repeated votes.

They're also pressing for passage of a poll-tested financing mechanism — a surcharge on income exceeding $1 million.

An AP-GfK poll taken Oct. 13-17 found 62 percent of respondents favoring the surcharge as a way to pay for jobs initiatives. Just 26 percent opposed the idea.

Republicans say the president is more interested in picking political fights with them than seeking compromise. Still, they don't seem to be afraid of a politically weakened Obama. Not a single Republican backed the president in last week's vote

At the same time, several Democrats opposed the underlying measure, even though they voted in favor of at least allowing debate to begin.

And Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent, said the stimulus-style jobs bill spends money the country doesn't have and takes revenues away from a special "supercommittee" charged with cutting the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over the coming decade.

According to the AP-GfK poll, Obama's party has lost the faith of the public on handling the economy. In the new poll, only 38 percent said they trust Democrats to do a better job than Republicans in handling the economy, the first time Democrats have fallen below 40 percent in the poll. Some 43 percent trust the Republicans more.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, speaking the day after Obama returned from bus tour, said the president's plan has the advantage of providing an immediate kick to the economy.

Republicans want to roll back government regulations that they say choke job growth. They backed free-trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama that were ratified this month. They also back extending tax breaks for businesses that buy new equipment and favor offering a $4,800 tax credit to companies that hire veterans.

Democrats and the White House, meanwhile, are confident that other elements of Obama's larger jobs bill, including extending cuts in federal Social Security payroll taxes, will pass. A 2 percentage point payroll tax cut enacted last year expires at the end of the year. Obama has proposed cutting it by an additional percentage point and extending the cut to the first $5 million of a company's payroll.