President Obama came to Philadelphia yesterday afternoon in the second of four “Moving America Forward” rallies. The president addressed a crowd of roughly 10,000 on a neighborhood baseball diamond in the city’s Germantown neighborhood.
The president immediately sought to characterize Republican opponents and upstart challengers to blue-dog and vulnerable incumbents as merely a part of an unthinking, opposition agenda. The “failed policies” of the Bush era and the prospect of America “stuck in ditch” were references peppered Obama’s remarks:
Shifting to the economy, the president was bullish on the notion that his policies helped avert a second Great Depression, and that the economy has been improving for the past nine months, proof for which he cited private sector job numbers.
Obama acknowledged that “of course people are frustrated,” but walked back his remarks somewhat by qualifying that that frustration arose from “the pace of change”:
Obama spent the final portion of his 28-minute-long remarks exhorting supporters to rally voters in the final weeks leading up to Election Day. The president said, “I know we’re a long way from the day of the hope and excitement we all felt on election night.”
Obama also told the audience that Republicans were “counting on young people staying home, and union members staying home, and black folks staying home”: