President Obama hit the campaign trail over the weekend after a new round of job numbers underscored his challenge to overcome a struggling economy in order to win re-election. The Labor Department reported Friday the economy added 96,000 jobs last month, a lower number than had been predicted. The official unemployment rate saw a slight dip to 8.1 percent, but only because less people reported they were actively looking for work. Speaking in New Hampshire, Obama urged supporters to back his call for tax cuts only for those making below $250,000.

President Obama: “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. But that’s not — 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. And there’s a lot more that we can do. You know, when Congress gets back to town next week, you need to send them a message: go ahead and give middle-class families and small businesses the confidence of knowing that their taxes, your taxes, will not go up next year.”

Campaigning in Virginia on Saturday, Republican nominee Mitt Romney seized on the latest job figures to paint Obama as weak on the economy.

Mitt Romney: “This president has not fulfilled his promises, and then he went to the Democrat convention and spoke at great length and had a lot of wonderful things to say, but he didn’t say what he’d do to help people get jobs or come out of employment — out of unemployment or to get people that are poor back to the middle class. He doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t have any ideas. And we’ve got to make sure he doesn’t have any more days in the White House after January.”