WASHINGTON - Since he announced his job-creation plan last week in a nationally televised address at a joint session of Congress, President Obama has hit the road, using stops in crucial swing states to press Americans to speak up.
"Democrats and Republicans have supported every kind of proposal that's in the American Jobs Act in the past," Obama said Wednesday in Raleigh, N.C. "Well, we got to tell them: 'Support it now.' That's where you come in."
So what are lawmakers hearing?
"Just a trickle of calls," said Hunter Lipscomb, a spokesman for freshman Rep. Steven Palazzo, R-Miss.
When Obama asked voters this summer to let Republican lawmakers know their opinions during the debt ceiling debate, constituents jammed phone lines across Capitol Hill and crashed many members' websites.
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But Congress isn't hearing much about Obama's jobs plan, a $447 billion package of tax cuts and tax credits for individuals and small businesses, along with new spending on schools, teachers, roads and bridges, aimed at putting millions of Americans back to work.
Alex Cruz, a spokesman for Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said her office had received 21 calls supporting the president's jobs proposal and five calls against it, "a tad" more than on a typical bill, but nothing out of the ordinary.
"So far, it is nothing compared to the volume on the debt limit vote," said Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.
The muted response from voters isn't what the White House was hoping for amid dismal economic warnings and the president's plummeting job-approval numbers.
At the White House, senior administration officials promised that the president will wage an aggressive campaign for the jobs package for the rest of the year, and look to portray Republicans as obstructionists if they don't pass it.
While Republicans seem receptive to the tax cuts and tax credits, they're not as warm to the spending, which they brand as more "stimulus."
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Tuesday that the president's method of paying for it, by ending tax credits for wealthy individuals and corporations, faced bipartisan opposition.
McConnell and other Republicans have charged that the plan is nothing more than a bid to save Obama's job, and political analysts say he appears to be taking a page from President Harry Truman, who barnstormed across the country in 1948 railing against a "do nothing" Republican Congress that hadn't supported most of his legislation. Truman won a close victory that year, and Democrats took back both houses of Congress.
