Bush Tries to Reassure Jittery Ohio Voters on Jobs

Thu Aug 5, 2004
By Steve Holland

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - President Bush on Thursday tried to reassure jittery Ohio voters that his prescriptions for the lackluster U.S. economy are paying off in a state that could be key to his re-election in November.

No Republican has ever won the White House without taking Ohio, and Bush and Democrat John Kerry are locked in a neck-and-neck race that could turn on economic issues.

Since Bush narrowly won the state in 2000, Ohio has lost 225,000 jobs and seen its unemployment rate rise from 3.9 percent to 5.8 percent as of June. Kerry has made a big issue of the economy as he seeks to grab Ohio for himself in the Nov. 2 presidential election, as Bill Clinton did in 1992 and 1996. Bush won in Ohio by 4 percentage points in 2000.

Bush's argument in Ohio, which has lost many manufacturing jobs, was that the U.S. economy is changing and people without jobs should get re-educated with government assistance. Meantime tax relief is leading to new investment that is creating jobs, he said.

"Some people are nervous, of course they're nervous," Bush said. "But there are jobs out there and the role of government is to help people train for the jobs."

Bush's specific purpose was to appeal to the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would let U.S. workers take time off as an alternative to overtime pay and give an employee the option of working flexible hours over a pay period to get time off for family or education.

He mentioned the proposal far into his speech and only briefly. Leaders of the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives withdrew the legislation in June because of a lack of support and the proposal appears dead for the year.

"I think the government ought to allow employers to say to an employee if you want some time off and work different hours you're allowed to do so," he said. "Government ought to be helping families."

John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions representing more than 13 million workers, said the idea was "really about giving America's corporations the flexibility to cheat their workers out of overtime pay after 40 hours a week."

"President Bush has already presided over the biggest rewrite of overtime rules in the history of the Fair Labor Standards Act, stripping overtime protections from up to six million workers. Now he wants to weaken the rights of the remaining workers who will still be eligible for overtime," said Sweeney.

Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer said: "George Bush hasn't had a 'working families' agenda for the last four years and it doesn't look like he's got one for the next four either."

Bush, who was to visit Saginaw, Michigan, later on Thursday, has launched a busy travel schedule in battleground states to try to keep the race close ahead of his own nominating convention in New York late this month.

He was in Iowa and Minnesota on Wednesday, hits New Hampshire and Maine this weekend, then goes on a West Coast swing next week. Vice President Dick Cheney and first lady Laura Bush have busy campaign travel of their own.

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