Kicking off his latest jobs tour at a high school in Texas, President Barack Obama told students that making quality education affordable and accessible was a key ingredient to jump-starting the U.S. economy.

Speaking at Manor New Technology High School in Austin to 400 students and teachers, Obama praised the school’s innovative education approaches, saying that both superior education and more policies to help the middle class were key to creating good jobs and attracting skilled workers.

“Thanks to the grit and determination of the American people, we’ve cleared away the rubble of the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes,” said Obama, “We’re poised for progress.”

To “reignite the true engine of middle-class growth,” the president said, the country has to become a magnet for good jobs, help people develop the education and skills for the jobs, and ensure workers can “achieve a decent living.”

With a veiled jab at inaction in Congress, Obama said where he could, he was “just going to go ahead and take actions on my own” and later today would be issuing executive orders “that I'm convinced will spur innovation and help businesses create more jobs.”

Those two executive orders, first laid out in the president’s State of the Union address, will focus on strengthening manufacturing and ensuring government data is available in machine-readable formats.

Obama praised Manor Tech for the way it is working to equip its students. The school, focused on preparing students for STEM careers in science and mathematics, selects students each year through a blind lottery, and has won plaudits for its academic success since its opening in 2007.

The president pointed out how students had been putting their knowledge to work, pointing out projects he saw on his tour of the school, including building musical instruments from mathematics equations and the use of robots and other technology.

Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images

President Barack Obama greets students after speaking on the economy and job creation after touring Manor New Technology High School in Manor, Texas, May 9, 2013.

And, according to the president, too much public speaking can never be a bad thing. “While most high school students in America give a handful of speeches by the time they graduate,” he noted, “a student at this school might give as many as 200.”

Obama joked, “That’s a lot of speeches. I can relate.”

But, the president pointed out, one reason the school has been a success is that it has been available to all students, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

 “The majority of students in Manor don’t come from wealth or privilege,” Obama said, noting the success the school had not only in keeping its students in school but helping them attend college.

“Folks around here are doing something right,” Obama added, “and I think the rest of the country can learn from what you’re doing -- because I’ve always believed that the best ideas usually don't start in Washington, they trickle up to Washington.  So I’ve come to listen and learn and highlight some of the good work that's being done.”

“There are too many kids in America who are not getting the same kinds of opportunity through no fault of their own,” said Obama. “We can do better than that. Every young person in America deserves a world class education. We’ve got an obligation to give it to them.”

“We’re not just a collection of individuals, we’re one American family,” said the president. “If we follow Manor's example, if we give every child the chance to climb new ladders of opportunity, if we equip every American with the skills and education they need to succeed in the jobs of the future, if we make sure that hard work pays off and responsibility's rewarded, if we fight to keep America a place where you can make it if you try, then you're not just going to be the ones that prosper, we'll all prosper, and together we'll write the next chapter in America's great history.”

This story was originally published on Thu May 9, 2013 5:37 PM EDT

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a pivotal member of a bipartisan group of senators trying to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that the key to a bipartisan “grand bargain” on entitlement reform and tax reform “is can we solve immigration?”

If Democrats and Republicans can come up with a bill to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, the South Carolina Republican said, it would open the way to a deal on entitlements and taxes.

Related: Graham warns of North Korean regime overplaying its hand

A member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham has been collaborating with three other Republican senators, Marco Rubio of Florida and Jeff Flake and John McCain of Arizona, along with four Democratic senators, to try to design an immigration bill. This group is known as the Gang of Eight.

“We’re hoping to get this thing done in the next couple of weeks,” the South Carolina Republican told NBC’s David Gregory.

The leading Democratic member of the Gang of Eight, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York said Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation that “So far we're on track. All of us have said there will be no agreement until the eight of us agree to a big, specific bill but hopefully we can get that done by the end of the week.”

The major impediment to reaching a final immigration accord is now the design of a guest worker program, Graham said on Meet the Press. If Republican negotiators are willing to allow a path to citizenship for those foreigners now illegally living in the United States, Graham said, “then the Democratic Party has to give us a guest worker program to help our economy. That’s what we’re arguing over.”

In a message to fellow Republicans, Graham said “the politics of self-deportation are behind us,” – a reference to an idea floated during the 2012 presidential campaign by GOP candidate Mitt Romney. Graham implied that the millions of non-citizens who are illegal living in the United States won’t leave voluntarily and he added that the concept of “self-deportation” was both “impractical” and “offensive.”

Graham said “nuggets” in proposals already leaked from President Barack Obama’s budget plan for the new fiscal year are “somewhat encouraging” and could lead to a deal with Republicans on entitlements and taxes. Obama is “showing some signs of leadership that has been lacking,” he said.

According to Obama administration officials, the president on Wednesday in his Fiscal Year 2014 budget blueprint will propose some changes in entitlement programs – such as a new formula for Social Security, which would effectively reduce retirement benefits, and raising the premiums that upper-income Medicare beneficiaries would need to pay for coverage.

“We’re beginning to set the stage for the grand bargain,” said Graham.

But he mentioned one idea that Obama has not proposed – raising the eligibility age for Medicare benefits from the current age of 65. Graham called for a change to “harmonize the retirement age of Medicare with Social Security.” For middle-aged and younger workers, the eligibility age for full Social Security retirement benefits is 67. For Medicare benefits, the eligibility age is now 65.

On immigration, Graham faces increasingly vocal opposition from some of his fellow Republicans in the Senate.

Related: LGBT activists jump into immigration fray, seeking same-sex partner protections, rights

On Friday, four Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, led by ranking member Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, sent a letter to Graham and the other Gang of Eight Republicans saying, “your group has secretly met for months and not consulted with members of the Committee about major changes to our nation’s immigration laws. The time for transparency has come.”

Grassley and his GOP colleagues complained about   the “rushed timetable” which they say Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D- Vt., has set for committee approval of the immigration overhaul, moving directly to committee drafting of a bill, with no additional committee hearings.

“We believe it is time for you to discuss the status of your negotiations, disclose what concessions have been made, and provide details to members of the Judiciary Committee as well as the entire Republican Caucus,” the Grassley group said in its letter to Graham and other GOP Gang of Eight members.

Updated at 6:05 p.m. ET -- Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder called himself "one tough nerd" in his 2010 gubernatorial campaign, fashioning himself as a pragmatic problem-solver who wouldn't delve into the divisive partisanship that had come to define some of his fellow Republicans.

Related: Michigan House passes right-to-work legislation

But now that Snyder has signed historic legislation making Michigan the nation's 24th right-to-work state, detractors will likely lump the governor with those firebrand Republicans, a distinction that he had long sought to avoid.

“I didn’t do this to get into the politics of it,” Snyder said on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon of the fight. He said the issue reached a “critical mass” after organized labor unsuccessfully pushed a ballot initiative this November that would have established a right to collective bargaining in the Michigan constitution.

Snyder had previously said that pursuing this legislation was not on his agenda. But Republicans in the statehouse, whose majorities in the House and Senate will be narrower next year due to the 2012 elections, revived the long-dormant proposal with Snyder's eventual blessing.

"Once we had the support that we had, the next step was convincing the governor that this was a good thing," said state Republican Rep. Marty Knollenberg, a primary sponsor of the bill in the House. "It certainly started from the legislature, and then it was presented to the governor … I think he was sort of taking a wait-and-see attitude. It wasn’t on his priority list, as he indicated."

But Snyder did ultimately embrace the law, and signed it into law on Tuesday evening. Whether he would be able to preserve his reputation as a non-ideologue is an open question.

"I think he kind of decided he couldn’t string this out any longer. The idea that he had some sort of moment where he was converted in a blinding flash of light – I don’t think that’s the case," said Bill Ballenger, editor of the "Inside Michigan Politics" newsletter. "Here you’ve got Michigan looking, all of a sudden, far more extreme and aggressive that Scott Walker. Isn’t that ironic?"

Snyder enjoyed a 51 percent approval rating for Snyder in an early December EPIC-MRA poll; 48 percent of Michiganders said they had a negative impression of Snyder's performance as governor. The same poll found that Snyder had an edge over a generic Democratic challenger in 2014.

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But the state was much more divided on the question of whether the legislature should pursue right-to-work laws. While the EPIC-MRA poll found that Michiganders were generally supportive of the concept of those laws, they were evenly divided – 47 percent in favor, 46 percent against – on the question of whether Michigan should adopt such a law.

Dale G. Young / AP

Governor Rick Snyder presents his views on Michigan's future energy plans and how they merge with environmental and resource management issues at MSU's WK Kellogg Biological Station, Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2012 near Hickory Corners, Mich.

Indeed, Snyder's decision to move forward with this proposal will inevitably invite parallels with GOP Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's work to push legislation that stripped public employees of their collective bargaining rights in early 2011. Like Michigan, Wisconsin is an industrial Midwestern state with a long tradition of unionism. And as with Wisconsin, Democrats and labor activists stormed the state capitol with unmet hopes of halting the changes to labor law.

“I think it’s important to make a distinction with Wisconsin and Ohio,” Snyder said on MSNBC. “That was about collective bargaining. That was about the relationship between employers and unions. This has nothing to do with that. Right-to-work has to do with the relationship between unions and workers.”

The bigger distinction might be the extent to which Michigan's fight was relatively bloodless. The fight in Wisconsin dragged out for days as Democrats in the state Senate went into hiding in Illinois to try to prevent a vote. And labor fought for months to recall Walker, an election which the Wisconsin governor survived this past June.

The right-to-work law moved much more quickly through Michigan's state government, giving opponents of the law barely any time to stop the bill. Even President Barack Obama's criticism of the law during a stop Monday in Detroit did little to halt the legislation's progress.

That sort of criticism could threaten to erode the reputation Snyder had built for himself during two years in office. Snyder, a former CEO of Gateway Computers, emerged from relative obscurity in 2010 to beat two well-known Republican challengers, Rep. Pete Hoekstra and Attorney General Mike Cox, in the primary on the strengths of his plain-spoken, jobs-oriented message.

Snyder tried to burnish his bipartisan bona fides upon taking office by appointing former State House Speaker Andy Dillon, a Democrat who'd unsuccessfully sought his party's gubernatorial nomination in 2010, as his state treasurer. He had sought to build a new bridge between Detroit and Canada over the opposition of some Republicans, and resisted a GOP initiative to ban domestic partnership benefits for gay and lesbian couples before relenting.

Democrats and their allies in organized labor are sure now to redouble their efforts to beat Snyder in 2014, despite a relatively thin bench of challengers. More voters (40 percent) said they would be less likely to give Snyder a second term if he pursued right-to-work than those who said they would be more likely to re-elect the Republican. 

Michigan will become the nation’s 24th right-to-work state after Republicans in the state legislature approved historic changes to the state’s labor laws over the strenuous objections of Democrats and union members.

The state House, which is controlled by Republicans, voted to bar workplaces from making union membership a condition of employment. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, has said he would sign the law – a symbolically important strike at the organized labor movement in Michigan, a traditional union stronghold.

Paul Sancya / AP

Protesters gather for a rally at the State Capitol in Lansing, Mich., Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012. The crowd is protesting right-to-work legislation passed last week. Michigan could become the 24th state with a right-to-work law next week.

The House voted 58-41, largely upon party lines, to approve a Senate version of the right-to-work law. The bill will head to Synder for signature.

Related: Michigan passes anti-union measure amid protests

As state lawmakers debated and voted upon the new law, thousands of union members rallied outside the state capitol in Lansing in an ultimately futile show of opposition to the proposal.

Michigan joins Ohio and Wisconsin – two other industrial Midwestern strongholds governed by Republicans in the statehouse – in advancing laws intended to weaken labor rights over the past two years. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, R, led an effort in 2011 to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights, which prompted massive protests and a legislative standoff. It also prompted an effort to recall Walker, which the governor survived this past June. Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, led the effort to pass similar legislation in his state, though it was undone by a subsequent ballot initiative.

Republican lawmakers had sought to ward off a similar ballot initiative by attaching the bill to an appropriations measure, a procedural tactic making the right-to-work law ineligible from a direct challenge at the polls.

Recommended: Fiscal cliff deal likely to be a fragile one

But union members believe they might have a chance to put the right-to-work law before voters as soon as 2014, though the changes to the law would be allowed to take effect in the meanwhile. And opponents of the right-to-work law would have to also meet a higher-than-usual threshold of support to put the question on the ballot.

Democrats vocally criticized the law in the debate preceding the vote, one lawmaker, Douglass Geiss, said there would be “blood” as a result of the law. State Rep. Shanelle Jackson, D, said the law guaranteed Snyder’s defeat in 2014, when he would be up for re-election.

Tuesday’s action makes Michigan the 24th right-to-work state, but only the second state in the Industrial Midwest to pass such a law. Michigan follows Indiana, which passed its right-to-work law in early 2012. Most other right-to-work states are located in the South and Plains states. Proponents of the laws argue that right-to-work laws have allowed those states to attract new jobs and industries, while labor advocates argue that workers in those states are forced to accept lower wages than they might enjoy in states where union membership in workplaces is compulsory. 

PATASKALA, OH -- Mitt Romney took his campaign's "closing argument" for a test drive in a Columbus, Ohio suburb on Friday, pledging bipartisan work toward "real change," and accusing President Barack Obama of failing to keep his promises.

"So this is a president who has promised a lot of things, but his record is very different than the promises," Romney said, abandoning the teleprompter he used during the speech -- but echoing the prepared remarks -- he delivered this morning in Wisconsin.

"Instead of building the bridges that we needed in America, he built a broader and broader divide. And I have a very different approach. I recognize that this president is again making new promises, and these are promises he can't keep, just like the last ones, because he says he's going to keep us on the same path we're on," Romney continued.

The closing argument, heavy on criticism of Obama's record and still wrapped largely around Romney's five-point plan for fixing the economy, also attempts to drive home the image of Romney as the "change" candidate this cycle.

“Accomplishing change is not just something I talk about, it is something I have actually done," Romney told a few thousand supporters gathered on a factory floor here, going on to cite his experiencing launching a business and turning around another as examples.

The Obama campaign brushed off Romney's claims of bringing about real change as simply "not true," arguing in a statement from spokesperson Lis Smith that Romney's version of change was to "bring back the failed policies of the past that crashed the economy and punished the middle class in the first place.

Romney will make one final campaign stop today at a rally outside Cincinnati, where he is expected to draw upwards of 10,000 supporters to an event where he'll be joined by 100 Republican leaders, who will then fan out across the state and the country on behalf of the Republican ticket.

Romney noted the importance of the Buckeye state, telling his audience they were "probably going to decide the next President of the United States." He made no mention, though, of the auto industry bailout nor his campaign's recent controversial ads about Jeep. Obama, also campaigning Friday in Ohio, used those points to pummel Romney on the stump.

MONTROSE, Colo. -- Just hours after the latest unemployment report was released Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan attacked President Barack Obama for not living up to his promise of getting more Americans back to work.

Related: Jobs data unlikely to sway undecided voters

"We just got the latest jobs report that voters are going to see before heading to the polls on Election Day. And what we saw today is that the unemployment rate is higher than the day that President Obama came into office," Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said. "We are 9 million jobs short than what he said he would accomplish. Look, in the president's campaign for another term, he has offered nothing different and if he is reelected, nothing different is exactly what we would get."

Recommended: Obama, Romney bring their closing arguments to the Midwest 

The U.S. economy added 171,000 jobs in October, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics Report, and the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9 percent, still below the important psychological threshold of 8 percent.

In the shadows of the San Juan Mountains, Ryan told voters in the key battleground of Colorado to hold on for just another few days.

"Here’s what it comes down to: we can't afford to wait four more years for real change to get us on the right track. We only need to wait four more days. Four more days and we can do this. Four more days. Four more days and we can get this on the right track," he said at the Black Canyon Jet Center to a cheering crowd.

Recommended: Democrats face very steep climb to 25 House seats they need

The Friday morning rally marked Ryan’s 11th in the Centennial State where Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Obama are in a dead heat to capture the state’s nine electoral votes. According to a CNN/ORC International poll released yesterday, Obama barely edges out Romney, 50 to 48 percent, among the state's likely voters. The two-point lead for Obama is within the polls margin of error.

Romney will hold two events in Colorado Saturday while Ryan returns on Sunday for an event in Castle Rock before Tuesday’s election.

Updated 2:35 p.m. ET -- Four days before voters head to the polls, President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney sought to bring their different economic visions into sharp relief before throngs of Midwestern voters who could decide the election.

Romney, who delivered on Friday what he said was the “closing argument” of his campaign, said the economy was hopelessly mired in stagnation under Obama, and promised to deliver “real change” if elected.

Jim Young / Reuters

Supporters of Mitt Romney gesture at a campaign rally in West Allis, Wis., Nov. 2, 2012.

Obama pointed to green shoots of economic recovery while barnstorming battleground Ohio, accusing his Republican opponent of deception on the question of change, as well as the 2009 auto industry rescue that could swing the outcome of the election.

Romney started the day with a speech in the battleground state of Wisconsin, assailing Obama for having failed at his promise to change Washington; Romney said his experience in the private sector and as governor of Massachusetts has shown he can boost the economy and bridge partisan divides that have grinded lawmaking in the nation’s capital to a virtual halt.

“The question of this election comes down to this: do you want more of the same or do you want real change?” Romney asked. “President Obama promised change, but he could not deliver it. I promise change, and I have a record of achieving it.”

A robust campaign schedule for Obama and Romney, along with their running mates, brought the campaign back to its central issue -- jobs and the economy -- just as a key monthly employment report showed that the U.S. added more jobs than expected in October. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the economy added 171,000 jobs last month -- though the unemployment rate inched upward to 7.9 percent as the size of the American workforce grew.

Check out the NBC News' Election Briefing Book

“This morning we learned that companies hired more workers in October than at any time in the last eight months,” Obama said at a Friday rally in Ohio. “We've made real progress, but we are here today because we know we've got more work to do. As long as there's a single American who wants a job but can't find one ... our fight goes on.”

The stasis in campaigning that set in following the landfall of Hurricane Sandy earlier this week had all but faded Friday, as both campaigns resumed their full-throated critiques of one another.

Romney sought to wrest the mantle of “change” away from Obama, continuing on a theme he has stressed in recent weeks, and going so far as warning on Friday that if the U.S. doesn't change course, it could risk slipping back into recession.

Obama has long blamed Republican obstructionism and special interests for impeding his agenda, and thereby, the pace of economic recovery.

Romney, who made his first stop in Wisconsin since naming Paul Ryan, a congressman from the state, as his running mate, suggested his experience as governor of Massachusetts and a former private equity executive would help him succeed where Obama had failed.

Jobs data unlikely to sway undecided voters

"I have watched over these last few months as our campaign has gathered the strength of a movement," Romney said. "I will reach out to both sides of the aisle. I will bring people together, doing big things for the common good. I won’t just represent one party, I’ll represent one nation. I’ll try to show the best of America, at a time when only our best will do."

Romney traveled next to Ohio, where he would join Obama in courting the vote of the Buckeye State -- a pivotal Midwestern battleground where the outcome could determine the winner of the Electoral College.

There, the president upbraided Romney on the notion that the Republican nominee could deliver change, ridiculing the GOP nominee’s proposals as little more than warmed-over leftovers from the Bush administration.

“We know what the right choice is, but let's face it, Gov. Romney is a talented salesman,” he said, accusing his Republican opponent of repackaging tired GOP ideas. “We know what change looks like, and what the governor's offering ain't it.”

The Obama campaign has relied on Ohio to serve as a kind of “firewall” for the president, concentrating for months on building an advantage over Romney in hopes of impeding the GOP candidate’s path to 270 electoral votes. Obama has led Romney by a slim, but consistent, margin in most public polls, prompting the Republican ticket to ratchet up its attacks on the administration’s handling of the auto industry bailout.

Romney’s offensive includes a series of new ads taking aim at the president on the issue of the auto industry bailout, stoking (incorrect) fears that Jeep would move production and jobs from the U.S. to China.

First Thoughts: A status-quo election?

Those suggestions earned him a strong rebuke from both the president, as well as Vice President Biden, who campaigned in Wisconsin, a state that has reliably supported Democrats in recent presidential cycles.

"Everyone knows it’s not true. The car companies themselves have told Gov. Romney to knock it off," Obama said of the ads, accusing Romney of trying to scare the state’s autoworkers. "You don’t scare hardworking Americans just to scare up some votes. That’s not what being president is all about. That’s not leadership."

Biden, speaking in Beloit, went a step further: “In the last hours of this campaign, Romney and Ryan have become truly desperate. Romney will say anything to win.”

But Republicans returned to the issue of employment, arguing Friday that the employment situation had scarcely improved over the last four years, and hardly matched the White House’s projections upon selling its stimulus package in January of 2009. That, they said, justified Obama’s expulsion from office.

“In the president’s campaign for another term, he has offered nothing different and if he is re-elected, nothing different is exactly what we would get,” Ryan said at a rally in Colorado. “And we are not going to let him get away with that are we?”

Battery manufacturer A123 Systems, which got nearly $250 million in grant money under President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus program, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday morning – just in time for Republican Mitt Romney to add the firm to his indictment of Obama’s green-energy program. In the first debate with Obama, Romney used the collapse of solar firm Solyndra to attack Obama’s energy agenda.

Herwig Prammer / Reuters

Energy Secretary Steven Chu

“A123’s bankruptcy is yet another failure for the President’s disastrous strategy of gambling away billions of taxpayer dollars on a strategy of government-led growth that simply does not work,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul on Tuesday.

But A123, based in Watertown, Mass., but with manufacturing plants in Michigan, got funding under the administrations of both Obama and President George W. Bush. The firm got a crucial influx of early money from the Bush administration in 2001 and 2003. In fact, the firm might not have been alive in 2009 to get its Obama stimulus funding if it hadn’t been for earlier subsidies under the Bush administration.

In a speech at a business conference on Sept. 4, 2008, then-Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman noted that in 2003 his department had made an award under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to A123 Systems for work on lithium-ion batteries.

“While this company now has major private investors, on many occasions the company's founders have described this SBIR grant as their first source of outside funding,” Bodman said. “And the results, now just five years later, are remarkable. This company now employs over 1,100 people who produce batteries with an unprecedented combination of power, safety and long life…”

He added, “I've had the pleasure of visiting A123 Systems, located right outside of Boston, and I can tell you firsthand that this company is doing terrific work.”

According to Jan. 21, 2010, testimony by current Energy Secretary Steven Chu before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, A123 Systems received SBIR grants in 2001 and 2003 totaling $850,000 to refine its lithium-ion battery technology.

Bush also laid the foundation for Obama administration subsidies to alternative-energy firms when he signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. (GOP vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan voted against the bill, partly due to an earmark in the measure that he said would benefit one forestry company.)

The 2007 law created, but did not fund, the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) program. In the summer of 2008 as the automobile industry was beginning to fall on hard times, Midwestern lawmakers proposed $3.75 billion to activate the ATVM and make loans to U.S. vehicle and battery firms.

When Obama became president, one of his highest priorities was to spur manufacturing of alternative-energy technologies and vehicles. The Energy Department used ATVM grants as a way to subsidize green-energy firms. On Aug. 5, 2009, Vice President Joe Biden announced $1.35 billion in DOE grants to spur advanced battery and electric vehicle manufacturing. A123 Systems got $249 million of that money.

“Terrific news," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. "A123 Systems is doing the kind of cutting-edge work we need to get our manufacturing industry back on track and create jobs here at home… These grants are a wise investment that will pay many dividends."

That summer of 2009 was a buoyant time for the firm, which launched its initial public offering in September, raising $390 million. “The IPO entered venture capital lore, a beacon for clean-tech entrepreneurs everywhere,” reported Climate Wire. The stock surged from its IPO price of $13.50 a share to more than $28 before 2009 ended.

The firm also got another Energy Department grant of $5 million to determine whether its batteries could store emergency power for the electric grid.

In January 2010, A123 was one of the firms benefiting from another stimulus cash influx – as the Labor Department announced the state of Michigan would get $5 million in grant money to train workers in green-energy skills.

In September 2010, Obama called Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to congratulate her and A123 Systems for opening the largest lithium-ion battery manufacturing plant in the United States in Livonia, Mich.

"It is incredibly exciting to see how far you guys have come,” Obama said, in remarks reported by the Detroit News. “This is about the birth of an entire new industry in America -- an industry that's going to be central to the next generation of cars.”

But there were skeptics.

By early 2011 one stock analyst, Theodore O’Neill, now at Litchfield Hills Research, told Climate Wire that A123 was heading for “a giant train wreck” in the next few years. He said the tiny numbers of U.S. battery-powered vehicles would not create enough demand for A123 to make a profit.

By this summer GOP lawmakers were raising the alarm about a Chinese firm taking majority ownership of A123 Systems. “We need to be sure that when the federal government invests close to a quarter of a billion dollars in grants to a company, that the technology developed as a result of this taxpayer support doesn’t end up in China,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

But that Chinese investment didn’t happen, and on Tuesday A123 filed for bankruptcy. A larger firm, Johnson Controls, will buy its factories in Michigan.

In an interview Tuesday, O’Neill said, “The Fisker Karma was the only car taking the A123 batteries. And I started calling around to dealers and as late as November of 2011 the dealers still didn’t have cars to sell. So you had A123 going ahead and building a 600,000-square-foot manufacturing facility for which there’s no end market. It’s not clear to me how much the Department of Energy is to blame for having A123 expand as rapidly as they did in advance of actual demand or whether it was all (A123’s chief executive) David Vieau” who erred in his forecast. “It’s probably a little bit of both,” he said.

NEWPORT NEWS, VA-- Mitt Romney resurrected one of his favorite attack lines against the president's economic stewardship on Monday, hitting President Barack Obama for 43 months of unemployment above eight percent, despite Friday's new data indicating the rate had finally fallen below that well-worn attack.

"We've seen the slowest recovery from a recession in history," Romney told a rain-soaked crowd of 500 supporters here on Monday. "As a matter of fact, I just read that if you look back 60 years, and you look at all the months we had with unemployment about 8 percent before President Obama, there were 39 months in all 60 years with unemployment above 8 percent."

"With this president, there have been 43 months under one president alone," Romney continued. "He does not understand what it takes to create a real recovery. I do."

The remarks came as Romney rushed through his second public appearance of the day, a rally at a park in Newport News, that the campaign chose to begin early and cut short due to a downpour that showed no sign of abating.

Romney gushed over the crowd, who cheered him as he hit on his economic talking points, as well as two of the three more personal anecdotes he began telling this weekend.

“People wonder why it is I’m so confident we’re going to win," Romney said. "I’m confident because I see you here on a day like this. This is unbelievable! Thank you so much! "

As the presidential election reaches its apex in intensity, so have arguments from the right that polls and economic statistics -- the numbers used to explain the 2012 campaign -- are not to be trusted.

The theory that many polls are under-sampling Republicans (and thus overstating the support for Obama) has become widespread on the right, as many supporters of Mitt Romney asserted this week during rallies before the first presidential debate.

“I’d prefer him to be higher in the polls, but I think a lot of conservatives just aren’t being polled,” said Cathy Barnes, a Romney voter from southeast Denver who attended the Republican nominee’s rally last Monday near Aurora.

“I don’t believe what they polls are saying, they’ve clearly been Democratic-skewed,” said Daniel Zustek, a health care worker from Denver, at the same rally. “If you look at the numbers – such as Ohio -- they’ve lost a lot of Democratic voter registration in the city of Cleveland, which isn’t stuff that’s really examined when they’re running these polls.”

“Push comes to shove, I think he’s ahead. I don’t think the Democratic turnout will be as high as it was four years ago,” Zustek added of Romney’s chances.

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“I think the media likes to slant what the Romneys do. Just because the media says something doesn’t make it fact,” said Rosabel Herrington of Romney’s disadvantage among women voters in most polls before a “Women for Mitt” event Tuesday in Littleton.

The argument is based largely on the notion that pollsters are using a turnout model that most closely resembles the 2008 election, when turnout was inordinately high and Democrats outpaced Republicans. Conservatives argue that these samples should more closely match the 2004 election (when Republican turnout was inordinately high), or, if nothing else, include more Republicans.

Bolstering that argument have been surveys issued by pollster Scott Rasmussen, which have typically shown a tighter matchup between Romney and Obama both nationally and in many swing states. (One reason for this is because the automated polls used by Rasmussen and other outfits -- which NBC News don't report on --  are barred by law from contacting voters whose sole phone line is cellular. These voters are typically understood to skew younger and toward minorities, and thus, more Democratic.)

Former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens (R) echoed this sentiment when firing up a crowd at a Romney rally Monday in Denver.

"As you know, this race is close, and it's going to get closer. Sunday's Rasmussen poll showed that 43 percent of voters say they are certain to vote for Mitt Romney, and 42 percent are certain to vote for President Obama," he said. "But as you know, the undecideds typically swing towards the challenger. And in Colorado, poll after poll has showed that our state is virtually tied."

Obama led Romney, 50 to 45 percent, in the most recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal-Marist poll of Colorado’s likely voters. And in the running tally of polls conducted by the website Real Clear Politics, which includes automated polls with varying party affiliations, Romney leads only in one: Rasmussen’s.

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And the Republican presidential nominee himself has invoked Rasmussen's polls to argue the race is much tighter than other polls had suggested.

"Actually the national polls, Rasmussen and Gallup have it a tied race," Romney told NBC's Ron Allen in an interview two weeks ago.

Since then, public opinion polls have shown the national tightening to a degree, and the impact of Romney's strong debate performance last Wednesday isn't fully reflected yet in polls.

The mounting criticism of polls mirrors what some Sen. John Kerry's supporters said about the Democrats' polling performance versus George W. Bush in 2004. But it also serves an unintended benefit for Romney in that Republicans might feel more engaged and active in backing the Republican ticket if they don't perceive it to be trailing Obama so badly.

A similar phenomenon emerged on Friday when conservatives expressed open skepticism of new monthly employment figures issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed that the economy added 114,000 new jobs in September, and that the unemployment rate had dropped from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent last month.

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric (the former parent company of NBC News), set off a firestorm by insinuating that the administration manipulated the jobs numbers because they were so incredible.

“I have no evidence to prove that. I just raised the question,” Welch explained later in the day on MSNBC.

Welch also declined to retract his assertion: “I don’t want to take back one word in that tweet. … It just defies the imagination to have a surge larger than any other surge since 1983 a month before the election.”

Other political figures weighed in to support Welch’s assertion. Rush Limbaugh expressed skepticism toward the numbers on his show, and one member of Congress encouraged doubt of the official job statistics, too.

"I agree with former GE CEO Jack Welch, Chicago style politics is at work here. Somehow by manipulation of data we are all of a sudden below 8 percent unemployment, a month from the Presidential election," Florida Rep. Allen West (R) wrote on his Facebook page. "Trust the Obama administration? Sure, and the spontaneous reaction to a video caused the death of our Ambassador ... and pigs fly."

But that notion was startling to several other conservatives. Tony Fratto, a former spokesman in President George W. Bush's White House, called the allegation of labor data manipulation "dumb conspiracy theories" on his Twitter page.

And Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist who formerly served as director of the Congressional Budget Office, strongly disputed the idea that Obama would manipulate September's report.

"These numbers put together by the BLS or BEA, they're all done by career civil servants who are experts in the area with complete integrity," he said. "If someone tried to do that -- if I, during my time in the Bush administration, had gone to the BLS and said, 'Juice these numbers,' they would have called the Washington Post so fast. That's just not acceptable; it's not how the process works."

Besides, Holtz-Eakin argued, Republicans have plenty to criticize in this jobs report. He argued that the drop in the jobless rate could be an aberration based on an unusually high number of households to report employment in this month's survey.

"We still have a labor force participation rate that's down at 1981 levels, and we still have an unemployment rate that's not a cause for celebration either," he said.

ABINGDON, VA -- Mitt Romney downplayed the importance of new, positive jobs data released Friday, telling a crowd of supporters here in rural Virginia the drop in the unemployment rate had more to do with workers dropping out of the labor force than with any real expansion of hiring.

"There were fewer new jobs created this month than last month," Romney said of today's report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which showed 114,000 jobs created in September, and revised the August number up to 142,000 new jobs.

Steve Helber / AP

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gestures during a rally in Abingdon, Va., Friday, Oct. 5, 2012.

The Republican presidential nominee's tack broke from a now-monthly tradition of seizing on weak employment reports to portray President Barack Obama as ineffective in turning around a struggling US economy, Mitt Romney downplayed the importance of today's more positive labor data,

"The unemployment rate as you noted this year has come down very, very slowly, but it’s come down none the less.  The reason it’s come down this year is primarily due to the fact that more and more people have just stopped looking for work," Romney continued. "If the same share of people were participating in the workforce today as on the day the president got elected, our unemployment rate would be around 11 percent. That’s the real reality of what’s happening out there."

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The report from the Bureau of Labor statistics shows workforce participation remained essentially flat in September, at around 64 percent, with an uptick in workers who took part time jobs for economic reasons, such as not being able to get full time employment. Updward-revised jobs numbers from July and August also contributed to the lower jobless rate.

While workforce participation has generally declined over the course of the past four years, workforce participation actually inched upward last month – meaning a drop in those seeking work wasn’t directly attributable to the lower unemployment rate last month.

But if the jobs report itself was a secondary focus in Romney's remarks today, the economy was once again front and center, with Romney telling some 3,300 supporters gathered here that he could grow the economy faster than Obama, and promising brighter economic days ahead.

"My priority is creating jobs," Romney said. "I’ll help small business do that, with everything I can do. Now we can do better. We don’t have to stay on the path we’ve been on. We can do better."

"When I’m president of the United States – that unemployment rate is going to come down not because people are giving up and dropping out of the workforce but because we’re creating more jobs," Romney said later. "I will create jobs and get America working again!" 

The Obama campaign challenged Romney economic plans in a statement released shortly after the event concluded.

"In fact, independent economists say his plans would not create jobs, could slow the recovery, and could actually cost us two million jobs over the next two years. The American people want to move forward, not back,” Obama campaign spokesperson Lis Smith wrote.

President Barack Obama used Friday's new jobs report showing that the unemployment rate had fallen below 8 percent to warn voters in battleground Virginia against electing Mitt Romney as president.

The monthly jobs survey issued this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the economy added 114,000 jobs in September, and that the economy added 86,000 more jobs in July and August than had been initially estimated. Most significantly, the unemployment rate fell from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent last month -- the lowest point since Obama first took office.

"This morning, we found out that the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since I took office," the president said at a campaign rally in northern Virginia.

The new economic data was welcome news for Obama, whose performance in Wednesday's presidential debate prompted hand-wringing from Democrats, who said the president wasn't aggressive enough versus Romney. Friday's data offered Obama an opportunity to play offense on the issue of the economy, the No. 1 issue in the election and a topic on which he often plays defense versus Romney.

"Today's news certainly is not an excuse to try to talk down the economy to score a few political points. It's a reminder that this country has come too far to turn back now," Obama said. "I can't allow that to happen. I won't allow that to happen, and that is why I'm running for a second term as president of the United States."

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The report was politically significant in that, for the first time, the unemployment rate fell below 8 percent -- an important psychological barrier, especially since Romney has made frequent reference to the tally of months during which the jobless rate has been above that threshold.

Mandel Ngan / AFP - Getty Images

President Barack Obama waves during a campaign event on October 5, 2012 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Romney has made the anemic economic recovery his primary argument in prosecuting the case against Obama. He said the only reason that the unemployment rate had declined was due to people dropping out of the workforce.

"There were fewer new jobs created this month than last month," Romney said while campaigning Friday in Virginia.

"The reason it's come down this year is primarily due to the fact that more and more people have stopped looking for work," added the Republican presidential hopeful. He argued that while it "looks like unemployement is getting better," the real jobless rate would be closer to 11 percent if the workforce hadn't shrunk during Obama's time in office.

The BLS report was the penultimate monthly update on the U.S. employment situation before the election. The jagged rate of recovery has caused heartburn for Obama in his bid for re-election -- particularly some disappointing reports in the late spring -- offered Romney ammunition to use against the president.

In those months, Obama saw public opinion toward the state of the economy and his management of it sour to a degree in public polling.

It has also been growing confidence in the economy that helped contribute to the president's advantage over Romney in late summer and through September.

Forty-four percent of voters said in the most recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll that they believed the economy would improve over the next year, improved from 27 percent of voters who expressed such an opinion in the July edition of the poll.

The Obama campaign has also sought to erode Romney's advantage on the economy with rounds of blistering ads questioning the Republican nominee's experience in private equity, and how Romney manages his own personal wealth.

But Romney still held an edge over Obama in this week's NBC-WSJ poll. Forty-five percent of voters said they thought Romney would better manage the economy, versus 42 percent who said the same of Obama.