The Hill News

Republicans who are on the campaign trail "yammering" about President Obama's jobs record should come up with their own plan, David Axelrod said Monday.

Axelrod, a former White House senior aide who left to become a top strategist for the president's reelection campaign, challenged GOP presidential candidates to produce their own alternatives to Obama when it comes to job creation.

"Elections are always about the future, and all these Republicans who are out there this weekend that are yammering about this are going to be under pressure to come up with their alternative strategies," Axelrod said during an appearance on CNBC.

A number of the GOP's presidential candidates piled on Obama on Friday after last month's job reports found that the economy added only 54,000 nonfarm payrolls in May, which meant the unemployment rate had inched back up to 9.1 percent.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) called those figured "underwh! elming," and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) said the figures were evidence that Obama "has failed to pull us out of this economic downturn."

So Axelrod challenged them to outline their alternatives.

Pawlenty will take a step toward that with a speech Tuesday in Obama's hometown of Chicago, which is being billed as a major economic policy speech. Romney's focused his campaign intently on the economy, and he, like a number of other members of the GOP field, is expected to detail his own economic plan in the weeks and months to come.

Axelrod defended Obama's economic record and downplayed the effect of Friday's jobs report on the president's campaign. The question for voters next November, he said, won't be so much the exact state of the economy, but rather whether they have a sense of progress being made.

"We've got 16 months before the election, and nobody really knows precisely where we'll be then," he said. "The que! stion is whether people will sense we're making progress on th! is probl em. I think they will."