President Obama responded by telling high school seniors in Virginia that he would push Congress to take action on some "common sense ideas," like not raising the borrowing rates for student loans.
The disparity in those reactions speaks not only to the natural differences between incumbent and challenger, but also to the very different ways in which Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, are talking about the economy as a robust recovery continues to elude the White House.
The president has doggedly pushed piecemeal proposals that he says will improve the lives of middle-income Americans — from hiring teachers and firefighters to streamlining the refinancing of home mortgages — as a way to revive the broader job market in the face of a hostile Congress. Mr. Romney has tried to keep the focus on the big picture — one that he contends reveals a president who has failed as a custodian of the economy.
For the White House, the second consecutive month of anemic job growth was an unwelcome portent on the eve of the first big campaign rallies of Mr. Obama's re-election bid, in Ohio and Virginia. It virtually guarantees that the economy will remain the dominant issue in the campaign, making it hard for the president to shift the focus to social issues or national security, where he has been able to stake out a stronger position.
Still, according to economists, political analysts and White House advisers, the payroll numbers were not bad enough to alter the basic narrative of an economy that is climbing, slowly but steadily, out of a historic recession.
"One month does not a trend make, and neither does two, but it gets you closer to a trend," said Jared Bernstein, a former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. "Once you see three months of deceleration on payrolls, along with other economic indicators, then you have a right to be more worried."
For Mr. Romney, who has treated previous job reports somewhat gingerly, the latest numbers elicited a searing tone, one that critics said edged into hyperbole. Speaking at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Mr. Romney said the economy ought to be adding 500,000 jobs a month — a growth rate the United States has achieved only five times in the last 50 years — and that any unemployment rate above 4 percent was a cause for concern.
In an open letter to Mr. Obama, published in The Plain Dealer a day before his rally at Ohio State University in Columbus, Mr. Romney wrote, "I have a simple question for you: Where are the jobs?"
Mr. Obama reacted to the bad news Friday much as he absorbed the better-than-expected job reports in January and February: accentuating the positive elements while conceding it was not enough. The economy, he noted, created 130,000 private sector jobs, while the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1 percent from 8.2 percent.
"That's the good news," the president said at Washington-Lee High School, after meeting with college-bound seniors. "But there are still a lot of folks out of work, which means we've got to do more."
Then he pivoted swiftly to a looming increase in borrowing costs for student loans, which would cause interest rates on these loans to double, to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent. Last week, the House passed a bill, 215 to 195, to maintain the rate for one year, but required that the $5.9 billion cost be offset by ending the Prevention and Public Health Fund contained in the health care law.
The president has threatened to veto the measure but he is not likely to be given the chance. Senate Democrats say they will bring their own bill to the floor for a procedural vote as early as next Tuesday. That bill would pay for the cost of the loan rate extension by closing some tax loopholes used by high-wage earners.
"My message to Congress is going to be, 'Just saying no to ideas that will create new jobs is not an option,' " Mr. Obama said in Arlington, Va. "There's too much at stake for us not to be all rowing in the same direction."
White House and campaign officials said Mr. Obama spoke often about the broad economy, but filled in his canvas with concrete ideas and policy proposals. Mr. Romney, they said, has not done that, and the remedies he has proposed are the kinds of tax breaks and rollback of regulations that deepened the financial crisis of 2008.
Binyamin Appelbaum and Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting from Washington. Ashley Parker contributed reporting from Pittsburgh.
