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President Barack Obama said on Friday that regulatory oversight of the country's banks might now be erring too much on the side of caution, potentially hindering the flow of credit to small businesses.
"The banks feel as if regulators are looking over their shoulder, discouraging them from lending," Obama told a town-hall style meeting in Elyira, Ohio during a trip to promote his jobs and health care policies.
Obama said it was not his intention to interfere with bank supervision. But he had told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to make sure that the country has not "seen the pendulum swing too far", with regulators now being too tough after being too slack in the past.
On other issues, it was a combative Obama that exhorted Congress to pass a new job-creation bill, taking a populist appeal to America's recession-racked Rust Belt in an effort to recapture the excitement of his campaign.
Obama weaved us-against-them rhetoric into his appearances, telling a town hall audience that he "will never stop fighting" for an economy that works for the hard-working, not just those already well off.
He said a jobs bill emerging in Congress must include tax breaks for small business hiring and for people trying to make their homes more energy efficient two proposals he wasn't able to get into a bill the House passed last month.
And he used the word "fight" or some variation of it over a dozen times. The House-passed $174 billion stimulus package faces a stern test in the Senate, in part because it is financed with deficit spending.
With the town hall meeting as well as tours and impromptu visits the people, Obama's day had the feel of a day from his campaign. He grinned, bantered and joked his way through the day, followed by campaign videographers.
After the upset win by Republican Scott Brown in a special Massachusetts Senate election this week a victory spurred in large part by an anti-establishment sentiment the White House was well aware that neither Obama's agenda nor the electoral prospects for fellow Democrats this fall can be taken for granted.
So in his at the town hall meeting at Lorain County Community College near Cleveland, the president assailed Washington and Wall Street alike, hoping to connect with public's frustration and position himself as the solution not the problem.
