Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., today laid into President Obama and his bus tour for jobs, saying that Americans have every right to be skeptical of the administration because is it is now “living with the hard reality” that the Obama policies have brought to bear on the U.S. worker.

“He wants people to think that the problem isn’t his policies,” McConnell said today on the Senate floor. “It’s those mean Republicans in Congress who oppose them. But the president leaves a few things out of the re-election script that he brought along on his bus tour.”

Citing that there are 1.5 million fewer jobs in American since the first stimulus effort, McConnell said Obama will just try to change the topic and “deflect attention” from his record during the president jobs tour this week.

“On the number one issue we face, jobs and the economy, the president’s policies haven’t worked as advertised,” McConnell said, “we’re now living under economic policies that president Obama himself put in place. This isn’t something you’ll hear on the bus tour.”

Democrats announced Monday that they are moving forward on the first piece of the Obama $447 billion jobs plan, breaking apart $35 billion for teachers, police officers and firefighters, paid for by a 0.5 percent tax increase on Americans making more than $1 million dollars. While Republicans and some Democrats are against the bill, given how it is paid for, this sets up an easy argument for Democrats and Obama to make, defining a vote against the bill as a vote against teachers and first responders.

“The choice is very stark with our colleagues across the aisle,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., laid out in a news conference today. “Do you want to employ teachers and firefighters, or do you want to protect those who make over a million dollars a year from paying a small amount more in taxes?”

Characterizing it as just more stimulus spending, McConnell today said this is a pattern in the Obama administration that doesn’t work.

“It didn’t work the first time. It didn’t work the second time. The third time won’t be the charm,” McConnell said. “Bailouts don’t solve the problem. They perpetuate it. Yet all we get from the president and Democrats in Congress is, ‘Do it again, or else.’”

Republicans are insisting that Congress work on something that can actually pass to create jobs, not something they know is divisive with the tax increase.

Democrats today signaled that if Republicans can support the bill and have an alternative way to pay for it, they’d look at the Republican proposals.