Pelosi: Our country is better off. Our country is better off than where we were. President Obama, this extraordinary president, in a very extraordinary time, pulled our country back from the brink of depression, a meltdown of our financial institutions, a deepening of our deficit. In the first two years, three and a half million jobs were created with the Recovery Act. President Obama was a job creator from day one. One week and one day from his inaugural address we passed the Recovery Act, the auto rescue, just two name a couple.

It's no comfort if you don't have a job to say "well, it could have been worse." It could have been much worse if we had elected a Republican president. When we lost the House, then the Republicans, who could have done much more if there was any level of cooperation, on jobs, but then they said "no, no, no, a thousand times no." Which meant millions of jobs not created. [...]

In one year, in one year under President Obama's leadership, more jobs were created in the private sector than in the eight years of the Bush administration. So all this talk that we're talking about, public, private [...] one year, more public [sic] sector jobs than eight years combined of the Bush administration. [Q: Public or private? I'm sorry.] Private. Private. Underline, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Private sector.

They thought that coming in and taking all the public sector jobs, police, fire, classroom and all the rest was a good thing? Whatever you think about the education of our children and the safety of neighborhoods, maybe that's something that's not important to you, these are consumers. These are consumers and their value is attested to for what they do for our community. But they are also consumers. So that hurt our economy.

So, fundamentally, our country is better off than it would have been if we'd continued down the path that the Republicans had us on. Mitt Romney wants to take us back down that path. The President wants to go forward, they want to go backward. They are advocating exactly the same policy.