Obama: August jobs report ‘not good enough’

President Barack Obama said Friday that new data showing that the sputtering economy created just 96,000 new jobs in August was "not good enough" as he opened a postconvention campaign swing through New Hampshire, Iowa and Florida.

"Today we learned that after losing around 800,000 jobs a month when I took office, business once again added jobs for the 30th month in a row—a total of more than 4.6 million jobs," he said in Portsmouth, N.H.

"But that's not good enough. We know it's not good enough. We need to create more jobs faster. We need to fill the hole left by this recession faster. We need to come out of this crisis stronger than when we went in," the president said. (Mitt Romney, meanwhile, described the convention in Charlotte, N.C., as the "party" and the jobs numbers as the "hangover.")

"There's a lot more that we can do," Obama said, urging supporters to press Congress to pass an extension of Bush-era tax cuts on income up to $250,000. Republicans want to extend all of the tax cuts, but the president said in his convention speech late Thursday that he would refuse to do so.