http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obama_asia

MUMBAI, India – Searching for help half a world away, President Barack Obama on Saturday embraced India as the next jobs-creating giant for hurting Americans, not a cheap-labor rival that outsources opportunity from the United States.

Fresh off a political trouncing at home, Obama was determined to show tangible, economic results on his long Asia trip, and that was apparent from almost the moment he set foot on a steamy afternoon in the world’s largest democracy. By the end of the first of his three days in India, he was promoting $10 billion in trade deals — completed in time for his visit — that the White House says will create about 54,000 jobs at home.

That’s a modest gain compared with the extent of the enduring jobless crisis in the United States. Economists say it would require on the level of 300,000 new jobs a month to put a real dent in an unemployment rate stuck near 10 percent.

Yet to Obama, the bigger picture was the lucrative potential of an unleashed trading relationship between India and the United States. He seemed comfortable and energized away from Washington, days removed from the GOP’s election thumping.”For America, this is a jobs strategy,” Obama said of his emphasis on trade, although it could stand as a motto for his 10-day trip. He is spending Sunday with young people in Mumbai and then heading onto meetings in New Delhi, the capital, before shifting later in the week ahead to Indonesia and economic talks in South Korea and Japan,

In India for the first time, Obama quickly got a sense of riches and poverty, history and tragedy.

His helicopter ride into this bustling financial center took in some of the country’s slums. His luxury accommodation for the night, the Taj Mahal hotel, was one of the sites of a terrorist rampage in Mumbai that killed 166 people. Obama and his wife, Michelle, paid quiet tribute to the 31 people slain at the hotel, looking over their names inscribed in a memorial before meeting with victims’ families and survivors of the shootings.”We visit here to send a very clear message that in our determination to give our people a future of security and prosperity, the United States and India stand united,” Obama said from an outdoor plaza, the soaring Gateway of India and the Arabian Sea behind him. “We’ll never forget.”

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