Obama pushes economic compromise as his bus tour nears end

Peosta, Iowa -- A day after pledging to send Congress a job-creation package next month and daring Republicans to block it, President Barack Obama provided little insight Tuesday into what form that plan might take.

Instead, on the second day of his bus tour of the upper Midwest, in his remarks to a gathering of small-business owners, community leaders and rural development experts at a small college, the president largely outlined the same blueprint for boosting the economy as he had in stops the day before.

The proposals included extending a payroll tax cut; spending money to repair the nation's roads and bridges, and the ratification of pending trade agreements.

And he continued to suggest that Republicans in Congress are all that stand in the way of economic growth.

"We could do even more if Congress is willing to get in the game," Obama said. "There are bipartisan ideas -- common-sense ideas -- that have traditionally been supported by Democrats and Republicans that will put more money in your pockets, that will put our people to work, that will allow us to deal with the legacy of debt that hangs over our economy."

But the question remains whether there will be more to the president's plan than he has detailed in public -- and whether he will throw down a gauntlet by formally submitting it to Congress, a tactic the White House has resisted in the past.

In a statement Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Republicans were waiting to act on pending trade deals with Colombia, Panama and South Korea -- but complained the White House hasn't sent them to Capitol Hill.

His remarks Tuesday echoed comments a day earlier when he slammed partisan politics and called on lawmakers to prioritize economic growth.

The Midwestern bus tour aims to promote the administration's rural economic development initiatives. The president said he will release a detailed plan to boost the economy, create jobs and control the country's deficit when Congress returns to Washington in September.

Obama began his tour with a town hall meeting at a riverside Minnesota park in Cannon Falls. His trip to Peosta followed stops in Minnesota and Iowa on Monday.

Republicans have blasted the Midwest swing, calling it a campaign event thinly disguised as an extended public policy discussion.

"He's spending taxpayers' dollars on a bus tour disguised as some kind of economic event for the country when we all know that it's a campaign event paid for by the taxpayers," Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus said Monday

The first family is scheduled to depart for a vacation in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, on Thursday.