And we're off

Speaking to a rally in Ohio, Obama called out House Minority Leader John Boehner by name for refusing to go along with middle class tax relief in order to save tax cuts for the rich.

"So let me be clear to Mr. Boehner and everybody else," the president said. "We should not hold middle-class tax cuts hostage any longer." The president said the White House is "ready, this week, if they want, to give tax cuts to every American making $250,000 or less," which he said was 98 percent of Americans.

With unemployment just below 10 percent and the economy as the foremost concern for most Americans, the president argued that Democrats were on the side of middle Americans while the GOP was aligned with the wealthy. But Obama told the crowd in Ohio that Rep. Boehner and the Republicans had been fighting to preserve corporate loopholes for big businesses and against plans to invest in America, even though GOP leaders took credit for some of the projects funded by Obama at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, he said.

The speech, which took place at Cuyahoga Community College in Parma, Ohio, also featured the president taking aim at the GOP for offering no new ideas. "A few weeks ago, the Republican leader of the House came here to Cleveland and offered his party's answer to our economic challenges," Obama told the crowd.

The president said the Republican leader's message might have been reasonable "if he had admitted his party's mistakes during the eight years that they were in power, if they had gone off for a while and meditated, and come back and offered a credible new approach to solving our country's problems."

"But that's not what happened," Obama said. "There were no new policies from Mr. Boehner. There were no new ideas. There was just the same philosophy that we had already tried during the decade that they were in power -- the same philosophy that led to this mess in the first place: Cut more taxes for millionaires and cut more rules for corporations."

The president's speech seemed designed to respond to recent poll numbers suggesting that Americans believe the GOP would offer something different from the past if they were put back in control of Congress. Obama's tough rhetoric follows his Labor Day speech on Monday, where he called for $50 billion in new infrastructure spending to create new jobs, rebuild roads and highways and technology, and get the economy moving again.

The latest presidential speech comes as polls show voter dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and the president's handling of the economy. Although the public's confidence in Republicans is not much higher, in generic preference questions (that don't mention specific candidates on the ballot) likely voters chose Republicans over Democrats by a wide margin.

But in Ohio on Wednesday, President Obama said his party wanted to "build a better country for our children and grandchildren" and set our sights higher. But as he cited his own party's achievements in health care reform and financial reform, he accused the Republicans of wanting to return to a time when "insurance companies go back to denying care for folks who are sick" or when credit card companies "go back to raising rates without any reason."

"Cleveland, that is not the America I know. That is not the America we believe in," the president told the crowd.