PubliCola's White House press pool pass was not good enough to get us into the Westin nor Rob Glaser's fundraiser.

But the Seattle Times has a report on the whole visit, including this outtake from Obama's speech at the Westin, where Obama criticized Dino Rossi for wanting to repeal the Wall Street reform bill.

The fault, Obama said in his speech at the Westin, lies with the Republicans. Likening the economy to a car, he said, "they drove it into a ditch.

"Me and Patty [Murray] and bunch of others," he said, are down in the ditch trying to push it out.

"We're pushing and shoving, it's muddy, there are bugs. And they're all standing there sipping Slurpees and watching," he said, referring to the Republicans — a line that generated laughs among the wall-to-wall crowd of Democratic supporters.

"When you want to move forward, you put your car in D," he said, to another round of laughs. "When you want to go backward, you put it in R. ... That's not a coincidence."

And, mining the Times report, the PI.com has Obama swinging at Rossi. And Rossi swinging back.

For our part, we got a war of words going between the Murray camp and National Republican Senatorial Campaign—which capitalized on Obama's visit today by trashing Murray for "rubber-stamping" Obama's signature health care reform bill.

Citing a Politico article about coverage for part-time workers, the NRSC says health care reform could "strip more than one million Americans of their health coverage."

Murray campaign spokeswoman Julie Edwards shot back:

Republicans are simply engaging in fear-mongering for cynical political reasons.  The Administration is still writing the rules on [the part-time employees section], but the bottom line is people are not going to lose coverage.  However, if national Republicans had their way, hard fought protections for people with pre-existing conditions, relief for seniors in the donut hole, and health care tax credits for small businesses would be thrown out the window.