Obama responds to job market news in North Carolina

Obama's team was seeking to identify itself with much-needed job creation, hoping that will help Democrats gain favor with voters after a bruising, yearlong battle with Republicans over health care.

Before Obama left for Charlotte, the Labor Department reported that employment improved significantly in March, with businesses adding 162,000 jobs to their payrolls.

But the improving economy was only strong enough to accommodate the tens of thousands of workers who flocked into the labor force. Thus, the overall unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.7 percent.

Furthermore, a large percentage of the gains were temporary census workers hired by the federal government.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in Washington that, while Friday's jobs report was encouraging, there is a long road ahead before the U.S. economy fully recovers from the downturn.

"There was not an announcement that was going to be made in any form on these numbers that would have caused us to declare that the mission had been accomplished," Gibbs told reporters Friday.

Despite adding jobs to the labor market in March, Gibbs said there was still cause for concern in the latest report, most notably the long-term unemployment numbers.

A broader Labor Department gauge of unemployment called "underemployment," which includes both the unemployed and those working part-time even though they preferred full-time work, rose to 16.9 percent from 16.8 percent. Furthermore, more than 40 percent of those without jobs have been unemployed for more than six months.

Obama toured the Celgard LLC manufacturing plant, an advanced battery technology manufacturer which makes membranes used mostly in lithium batteries. The company was selected in August for a grant of $49 million from the U.S. Energy Department.

Since then, it has hired new workers and expanded its operations.

White House economist Christina Romer said in a statement that while Friday's jobs report showed signs of a gradual economic recovery, the American labor market remains "severely distressed." Romer said Americans should expect the unemployment rate to remain volatile, and warned of bumps in the road ahead.

Republicans have created a steady drumbeat of criticism of Obama's stewardship of the economy and against his health care victory in the hopes voters blame Obama at the ballot box in November.

"A near 10 percent unemployment rate is completely unacceptable, and no amount of temporary taxpayer-funded temporary Census workers can mask the pummeling America's employers are taking from Washington Democrats' job-killing agenda," said House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Between now and November, Democrats are looking to illustrate their economic accomplishments.

Obama has pushed Congress to use $30 billion that had been set aside to bail out Wall Street to start a new program that provides loans to small businesses, which the White House calls the engine for job growth.

On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on NBC that administration officials were "very worried" about recovering the jobs lost in the recession. But he noted that business growth has been improving and he expected the economy to start creating jobs again.

More than 11 million people now are drawing unemployment insurance benefits, and the overall jobless rate of 9.7 percent understates the true level of economic misery because many people who have given up looking for work are no longer in the official count of the unemployed.

A report Thursday said initial claims for unemployment benefits fell slightly last week as the recovering economy moves closer to generating more jobs. The Labor Department said new jobless benefit claims dropped 6,000 to a seasonally adjusted 439,000, nearly matching analysts' estimates. It was the fourth drop in five weeks.

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