President Obama speaks during an event Wednesday with middle-class Americans who would see their taxes go up if Congress fails to act to extend their tax cuts. (Jewel Samad / AFP/Getty Images / ) 
 
 WASHINGTON -- President Obama called on Americans to pressure Congress using Twitter and other social media to save middle-class tax cuts, warning that “if we get this wrong, the economy is going to go south.” 
 
 His comments Wednesday before TV cameras at the White House marked the start of a full-fledged public relations campaign to prevent automatic tax hikes and spending cuts from kicking in next year. 
 
 “If Congress does nothing, every family in America will see their taxes automatically go up at the beginning of next year,” he told a group of middle-class income earners, along with members of labor, progressive and civil rights organizations who were assembled on the White House grounds. 
 
 “I’ll go anywhere and I’ll do whatever it takes to get this done,” Obama added. “It’s too important for Washington to screw this up.” 
 
 PHOTOS: President Obama’s past 
 
 Obama urged Americans to tweet members of Congress – even providing a specific hash-tag, #My2K – or post on Facebook or send an e-mail to support his proposal to agree not to raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year, which he said would cover 98% of Americans and 97% of small businesses. 
 
 “If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, when the American people speak loudly enough, lo and behold, Congress listens,” he said. 
 
 The president twice mentioned the #my2k hash-tag, and it later was featured prominently on a screen behind White House Press Secretary Jay Carney throughout his televised afternoon briefing. 
 
 Republican leaders in Congress don’t like the president’s PR campaign any more than they like his message. The time Obama is devoting to promoting his ideas with the public would be better spent meeting with congressional leaders, according to Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. 
 
 House Republicans called for the president to unveil proposed spending cuts that are as detailed as his tax proposals. 
 
 A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) cited the bigger goal of reducing the national deficit, asking when the White House would seriously discuss reducing spending for Medicare, Medicaid and other popular entitlement programs. 
 
 QUIZ: How much do you know about the fiscal cliff? 
 
 An Obama aide said the president has “flexibility” on tax rates and entitlement reform. But the president described long-term deficit control as “our ultimate goal” in his remarks Wednesday. His immediate goal, he said, is getting Congress to lock in middle-class tax cuts before they expire on Dec. 31. 
 
 “Do what it takes to communicate a sense of urgency,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of time here.” 
 
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 christi.parsons@latimes.com 
 
 Twitter: @cparsons ||||| Business executives and others who’ve met with President Barack Obama in recent days describe a president who’s supremely confident that he’ll come out on top of a fiscal cliff deal — with Republicans bending to his will on tax increases for the wealthy and Democrats sucking up deep spending cuts. 
 
 These people say Obama is dismissive of the idea that deduction limitations and loophole closings alone are a sufficient or even desirable way to achieve the $1 trillion or more in new revenue he is seeking. And they say the president believes his relentless public campaign — which continued Wednesday and hits the road on Friday — along with widespread support in polls for letting the top George W. Bush-era rate cuts expire will overwhelm any remaining GOP resistance. 
 
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 reset Obama presses Congress on tax cuts POLITICO LIVE: Quick deal coming? 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Cliff dive doesn’t appeal to White House) 
 
 “For him the question on top rates isn’t just about fairness, it’s about math,” said one top financial services executive, who like others interviewed for this story declined to be identified by name in order to speak candidly about private meetings. “You might be able to get a similar amount of revenue but all of the deduction closings would create their own problems. Closing the mortgage deduction could hurt the housing market, for example. His commitment to rate increases is absolutely unshakable and he believes the politics are firmly on his side.” 
 
 The executive and others briefed on White House fiscal cliff strategy say if the GOP line against marginal rate increases somehow holds between now and the end of the year, when the fiscal cliff tax hikes and spending cuts begin to kick in, the president is confident he can use a pair of bully pulpit bazookas early next year — the second inaugural address and the State of the Union speech — to blast Republicans as holding the American economy hostage to a narrow and outdated ideology. 
 
 (See also: Reid: Tie debt ceiling, fiscal cliff) 
 
 The inaugural is usually more of a positive, sweeping kind of speech, but even that address would allow the president to clearly articulate his vision in contrast to that of Congressional Republicans, these people said. 
 
 “He’d rather get past this and use the speeches to lay out the vision for the second term on immigration, energy, climate, broader deficit reduction and other issues, but if he has to, he will call Republicans out yet again,” said the executive, who has been in White House meetings. “And they just don’t have anything like that kind of platform to respond.” 
 
 The executive and others who attended or were briefed on White House meetings added that the president was also adamant about having dividend and capital gains tax rates rise from their Bush-era levels but was not doctrinaire about exactly where they should wind up. 
 
 The White House already sees signs that the public pressure campaign is melting GOP opposition. 
 
 The latest example comes from Rep. Tom Cole, former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. The Oklahoma Republican said on Tuesday that the GOP should agree to a quick deal that keeps the Bush era tax rates for 98 percent of taxpayers while letting the top two rates increase. 
 
 Cole said doing so would not violate Grover Norquist’s no-new-taxes pledge signed by many Republicans because it would amount to approving a tax cut for most tax payers and simply doing nothing about the other rates, which were scheduled to expire under the legislation first pushed by Bush in 2001. ||||| WASHINGTON — President Obama surrounded himself with taxpayers on Wednesday to pitch his plan to preserve current rates for the middle class and raise them for the wealthy. A day before, he met with small-business owners for the same purpose. On Friday, he plans to fly to Pennsylvania to tour a factory to make the same point. 
 
 As the president and Congress hurtle toward a reckoning on the highest federal budget deficit in generations, Mr. Obama says he wants a “balanced” approach to restoring the nation’s fiscal order. But the high-profile public campaign he has been waging in recent days has focused almost entirely on the tax side of the equation, with scant talk about his priorities when it comes to curbing spending. 
 
 Mr. Obama has embraced specific cuts to the federal budget in the past and has committed to an agreement with Congress that will include deep reductions in spending. But it would be easy for those who listen to his public pronouncements lately to miss it. In public statements since his re-election, he has barely discussed how he would pare back federal spending, focusing instead on the aspect of his plan that plays to his liberal base and involves all gain and no pain for 98 percent of taxpayers. 
 
 Republicans and even some Democrats have expressed frustration that Mr. Obama has avoided a serious public discussion on spending with barely a month until deep automatic budget cuts and tax increases are scheduled to take effect. While the president’s aides said it was important to engage the public on taxes, others say he has not prepared the country for the sacrifice that would come with lower spending. 
 
 “The problem is real,” said Erskine B. Bowles, who was co-chairman of Mr. Obama’s deficit reduction commission. “The solutions are painful, and there’s not going to be an easy way out of this.” 
 
 After meeting with White House officials this week, Mr. Bowles said he believed “they were serious about reducing spending” but added that “we need to talk more about the spending side of the equation.” 
 
 Republican leaders were more scathing, saying the president was more interested in campaigning than sitting down to resolve difficult issues. They said they were willing to raise tax revenue by closing loopholes and limiting deductions, but Mr. Obama has not reciprocated with more restraint of entitlement programs. 
 
 “We have not seen any good-faith effort on the part of this administration to talk about the real problem that we’re trying to fix,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader. “This has to be a part of this agreement or else we just continue to dig the hole deeper, asking folks to allow us to kick the can down the road further. And that we don’t want to do.” 
 
 Although Mr. Obama has not scheduled a new meeting with Congressional leaders, he will dispatch top advisers to Capitol Hill for talks on Thursday. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Rob Nabors, the White House legislative director, will pay separate visits to Senators Harry Reid of Nevada and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Democratic and Republican leaders, and Representatives John A. Boehner of Ohio and Nancy Pelosi of California, the Republican speaker and Democratic minority leader. 
 
 Mr. Obama met privately on Wednesday with the chief executives of 14 major corporations like Goldman Sachs, Home Depot, Marriott, Coca-Cola, Pfizer and Yahoo to discuss the fiscal situation. 
 
 “He seemed flexible, but he said taxes should go up on the top 2 percent,” said one executive who did not want to be named. Most of the executives said they were not opposed to tax increases as part of a deal but stressed that a quick resolution could help the economy. 
 
 White House officials rejected Republican suggestions that Mr. Obama has not been serious enough about tackling the growth of entitlement spending. “He is committed, every time he talks about this, to a balanced approach that includes both, you know, revenues, spending cuts and savings through entitlement reforms,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. 
 
 White House officials pointed to $340 billion in health care entitlement program savings and $272 billion in reductions to other mandatory programs over 10 years in a previous presidential budget proposal. “Even though that budget proposal’s been out there for a long time, a lot of people aren’t aware of that,” Mr. Carney said. “ He called it “another piece of evidence that the president has been willing to make tough choices.” 
 
 One reason a lot of people may not be aware of the cuts Mr. Obama has proposed is that he does not talk about them often. In his first postelection news conference, he focused on tax increases on the wealthy and used the term “spending cuts” just once without elaborating. 
 
 By focusing on taxes, Mr. Obama has put Republicans on the defensive. At Wednesday’s event, he challenged them to extend Bush-era tax cuts for family income under $250,000 since both sides agree those should continue. Doing so would effectively mean tax cuts on income over $250,000 would expire at the end of the year since Mr. Obama would not sign a separate bill extending them. 
 
 The president’s public lobbying seemed to crack through the solid Republican opposition this week when a prominent conservative, Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, urged his party to seek such a quick deal with Mr. Obama extending middle-class tax cuts. Mr. Boehner pushed back against Mr. Cole on Wednesday, saying that would hurt small businesses and the economy. 
 
 At the same time, Mr. Obama evidently sees no percentage in talking in detail about spending cuts, acutely aware that his liberal base is unenthusiastic about paring back entitlement programs. Senator Richard J. Durbin, a longtime Illinois ally and the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said this week that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security should not be part of current budget talks. 
 
 As the two sides continued to shadowbox, Mr. Bowles was skeptical, putting the chances of a deal by the end of the year at one in three. “I believe the probability is that we are going over the cliff,” he said, “and I think that will be horrible.”
– President Obama is enlisting social media to help him in negotiations with Republicans on the fiscal cliff. The president today asked people to tweet their congressional representatives to urge them to preserve middle-class tax cuts, and he even provided a hashtag: #My2k. “If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, when the American people speak loudly enough, lo and behold, Congress listens,” he said. It's all part of a White House PR campaign just kicking into gear, reports the LA Times. Also of note: GOP Rep. Tom Cole said Republicans should extend the Bush tax rates for 98% of Americans but let the top two rates rise. John Boehner immediately rejected the idea, but anti-tax-man Grover Norquist himself called it an "interesting tactic and strategy," reports Politico. Erskine Bowles, he of the president's deficit-reduction commission, doesn't sound optimistic, reports the New York Times. "I believe the probability is that we are going over the cliff, and I think that will be horrible," he said. “It will be devastating to the economy.”