The US President, Mr Barack Obama, has said that he did not run for “this office” to get back to where America was and asserted that the country will “thrive again”, leaving behind an economy which is “built to last’’.

“I did not run for this office just to get back to where we were. I ran for this office to get us to where we need to be. And I promise you we will get there,” Mr Obama said yesterday at the Rolls-Royce Crosspointe in Petersburg, Virginia.

Mr Obama is seeking re-election in the November presidential elections.

“Some of these challenges may take a year; some may take one term; some may take a decade. But we’re going to get there because when we work together, we know what we’re capable of. We’ve got the tools. We’ve got the knowhow. We’ve got the toughness to overcome any obstacle.

“And when we come together and combine our creativity and our optimism and our willingness to work hard, and if we’re harnessing our brainpower and our manpower, our horsepower, I promise you we will thrive again, we will get to where we need to go, and we will leave behind an economy that is built to last. We will make this another American century,” said the US President.

Observing that for generations of Americans, manufacturing has been the ticket for the middle class, Mr Obama said that was why one of the first decisions he made as president was to stand by manufacturing, to stand by the American auto industry when it was on the brink of collapse.

“The heartbeat of American manufacturing was at stake, and so were more than a million jobs. And today the American auto industry is coming back, and GM is number one in the world again, and Ford is investing billions in American plants and factories. And together, over the past two-and-a-half years, the entire auto industry has added more than 200,000 jobs,” he said.

They’re not just building cars again; they’re building better cars,” he said.

For the first time in three decades, Mr Obama said, US raised fuel standards so that, by the middle of the next decade, the cars that are built in America will average nearly 55 miles to the gallon. That will save the typical family about $8,000 at the pump over time.

“That’s real savings. That’s real money.”

The US President said it showed that depending on foreign oil doesn’t have to be America’s future. “It shows that when we harness our own ingenuity, our technology, then we can control our future. See, America thrives when we build things better than the rest of the world. I want us to make stuff here and sell it over there. I don’t want stuff made over there and selling it over her.”

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