Obama seeks to reassure Americans

Associated Press

ATKINSON, Ill.

Confronting the most public anxiety yet of his Midwestern tour, President Barack Obama sought Wednesday to reassure an audience in his home state of Illinois that the economy would recover, but warned that Washington is not the answer to the nation’s economic troubles.

He conceded that it will take at least a year for housing prices and sales to start rising, a key marker of an improved economy.

On the final leg of a three-state bus tour, Obama rolled into Atkinson, in western Illinois, for a town hall with residents, and their questions — about government regulations, housing, jobs and the fate of Social Security — underscored the anxiety people across the country are feeling.

The jobless rate in Illinois was 9.2 percent in June, matching the national rate for that month. The Illinois rate is also several points higher than in Minnesota and Iowa, the two other states Obama visited on his tour.

His housing comments were in response to a grilling from a real-estate-company owner who said she had begun to see a turnaround in late spring but that her phones stopped ringing after last month’s “debt-ceiling fiasco,” when a government default seemed possible.

“We have no consumer confidence after what has just happened,” she told the president. “I should be out working 14 hours a day, and I am not.”