(09-26) 13:00 PDT MOUNTAIN VIEW -- President Obama took his jobs message to Silicon Valley this morning at a town hall meeting with LinkedIn where he said Americans are "just looking for common sense" from their leaders in solving the unemployment problem but "ideologically driven" politicians in Washington are "focused on the next election and putting party ahead of country."
"I am extra confident about America's longterm future but we are going to have to make decisions about how we move forward," he told a audience of 350 employees and invited guests of LinkedIn at the Computer History Museum near the firm's headquarters in Mountain View.
The event was Obama's third town hall this year in collaboration Bay Area social networking companies. His forum today took place just hours before three Republican leaders in Congress, known as the "Young Guns" and including House Majority leader Eric Cantor, were to discuss their plans for jobs at Facebook in Palo Alto, where the President appeared with CEO Mark Zuckerberg in April.
In choosing LinkedIn, the White House said it aimed to reach "a community focused on the economy and job growth," The company was founded in 2003 and boasts 120 million members in 200 countries, with two new members every second.
While LinkedIn sought questions from millions of Americans, the setting at the museum was an intimate affair, with CEO Jeff Weiner seated together. But unlike Obama's past town halls, many questions came from unemployed Americans, some of them visibly worried about the future and hoping to again find a job.
"The challenge is making sure that you hang in between now and then," the president assured one unemployed IT professional and unidentified LinkedIn member and guest who asked for "words of encouragement" in his employment search.
"The problem is not you: the problem is the economy as a whole," Obama told the man. "My job is to work with everybody I can, from the business community to Congress ... to see if we can speed up this process of healing, this process of recovery."
The president's visit to LinkedIn came amid a fundraising frenzy on the West Coast, which seven events in two days that included two events for deep-pocketed donors in Silicon Valley on Sunday, one of which was a $35,800-per-person dinner at the home of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg that inlcuded pop star Lady Gaga.
While the LinkedIn event wasn't billed as a campaign stop, it often mirrored one - with Weiner opening the event by endorsing the president's jobs bill, the American Jobs Act, as the best means of getting Americans back to work. And questions from the crowd and the Internet audience, all of them chosen by the firm, did not challenge Obama.
Doug Edwards, 53, a retired Google executive, said he had made so much money in the Silicon Valley that he no longer needed to work and asked Obama, "Would you please raise my taxes?"
"I would like the country very much to continue" to pay for "things like Pell Grants ... and job training programs," Edwards said. "It kills me to see Congress not supporting the expiration of the tax cuts that have been benefiting us for so long."
Obama, seizing on a theme that he has repeatedly touched on across the nation in recent weeks, said in response that taxing wealthier Americans often "gets framed as class warfare."
"America's success is premised on entreprenuers pursuing their dreams and making a whole lot of money in the process," he said. "We're successful because somebody invested in our education, somebody built schools, somebody created incredible universities."
Obama said the question now facing America is: "If we're going to make those investments, how do we pay for it?"
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/26/MNVS1L9K5B.DTL
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