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Politics Today is CBSNews.com's inside look at the key stories driving the day in politics, written by CBS News Political Director Steve Chaggaris:

** The president meets with world leaders

** A general's report presses for more troops

** N.Y. Gov. Paterson feels the heat from the White House

(AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

He'll visit "Hudson Valley Community College where he will tour a technology classroom, visit a lab and deliver remarks on his commitment to fostering new jobs, new businesses, and new industries by laying the groundwork and the ground rules to best tap our innovative potential," an administration official tells CBS News. "His remarks will outline the Administration's strategy for innovation: investing in education, infrastructure and research; spurring productive entrepreneurship and sustaining competitive markets and achieving breakthroughs for national priorities including health care and energy."

During his speech, which is scheduled for 11:50am ET, "Obama plans to decry a U.S. economy that relies on explosive growth in some areas that mask long-term weaknesses. Instead, he plans to say, the economy has to be a consistent string of new ideas that refresh the market at a constant pace. The president fond of criticizing 'a bubble-and-burst' cycle also plans to describe a future built by skilled workers and sound investments," adds the Associated Press' Philip Elliott.

"He will point to more than $100 billion in economic stimulus dollars that Congress approved earlier this year to look for breakthroughs in areas as diverse as health, energy and information technology and to his spending priorities, which included the largest increase in basic research in history. Although deeply unpopular among conservatives, administration officials insist the spending pulled the economy back from the brink and avoided a potential economic depression."

Meantime, "The president will ... attend his first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly and then to a summit of the Group of 20 largest economic powers in Pittsburgh on Thursday and Friday," the Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman reports.

"In both venues, expectations will be high for concrete action to counter Iran's nuclear program, reinvigorate Middle East peace talks, and shore up support for the war in Afghanistan. Leaders also will be looking for action to counter global warming, revive free trade and strengthen financial regulation.

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Politics Today: Obama Faces Tough Choices on War - CBS News

"We don't yet have a complete strategy because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis," Obama said during concluding remarks at the G7 conference in Germany, citing recruitment as a key stumbling block facing the central government in Iraq.

Critics of the administration's strategy in Iraq seized upon the President's comments Monday, claiming they indicated a policy failure and referencing similar comments Obama made in August.

"What has President Obama been doing for the last 10 months?" the Republican National Committee wrote Monday. House Speaker John Boehner took the attack another step, responding to Obama with a tweet of a popular emoticon of a person shrugging ("_()_/ ") as a shorter summary of Obama's strategy.

RELATED: Rubio on Iraq: 'Nation-building' vs. help 'building their nation'

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Arizona, hammered Obama on the Senate floor Monday, saying the lack of a strategy is alarming "while ISIS goes from house to house in Ramadi with lists of names and they execute people and they kill 3-year-old children, and they burn their bodies in the streets and the atrocities in Syria continue as Bashar Assad barrel bombs innocent men, women and children."

"One can wonder, one has to wonder, whether this President just wants to wait out the next year and a half and basically do nothing to stop this genocide, bloodletting, horrible things that are happening throughout the Middle East," McCain said.

Obama said during an August press conference his administration was still devising a way to fight ISIS.

"I don't want to put the cart before the horse. We don't have a strategy yet," he said at the time.

Boosting the fighting power of Iraqi forces has proven difficult for the U.S., which is relying on local forces to beat back ISIS terrorists who have gained ground in places like Ramadi and Mosul.

After last month's ISIS siege in Ramadi, the U.S. defense secretary Ash Carter blamed a "lack of will" within Iraqi's military for the setback. Since then, local Sunni fighters and Shia militias have joined the fight.

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Obama Iraq troops: 'No complete strategy' on ISIS fight ...

Barack Obama,in full Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961,Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.),44th president of the United States (2009 ) and the first African American to hold the office. Before winning the presidency, Obama represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate (200508). He was the third African American to be elected to that body since the end of Reconstruction (1877). In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.

Obamas father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a teenage goatherd in rural Kenya, won a scholarship to study in the United States, and eventually became a senior economist in the Kenyan government. Obamas mother, S. Ann Dunham, grew up in Kansas, Texas, and Washington state before her family settled in Honolulu. In 1960 she and Barack Sr. met in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii and married less than a year later.

When Obama was age two, Barack Sr. left to study at Harvard University; shortly thereafter, in 1964, Ann and Barack Sr. divorced. (Obama saw his father only one more time, during a brief visit when Obama was 10.) Later Ann remarried, this time to another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, with whom she had a second child, Maya. Obama lived for several years in Jakarta with his half sister, mother, and stepfather. While there, Obama attended both a government-run school where he received some instruction in Islam and a Catholic private school where he took part in Christian schooling.

He returned to Hawaii in 1971 and lived in a modest apartment, sometimes with his grandparents and sometimes with his mother (she remained for a time in Indonesia, returned to Hawaii, and then went abroad againpartly to pursue work on a Ph.D.before divorcing Soetoro in 1980). For a brief period his mother was aided by government food stamps, but the family mostly lived a middle-class existence. In 1979 Obama graduated from Punahou School, an elite college preparatory academy in Honolulu.

Obama attended Occidental College in suburban Los Angeles for two years and then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where in 1983 he received a bachelors degree in political science. Influenced by professors who pushed him to take his studies more seriously, Obama experienced great intellectual growth during college and for a couple of years thereafter. He led a rather ascetic life and read works of literature and philosophy by William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Toni Morrison, and others. After serving for a couple of years as a writer and editor for Business International Corp., a research, publishing, and consulting firm in Manhattan, he took a position in 1985 as a community organizer on Chicagos largely impoverished Far South Side. He returned to school three years later and graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard Universitys law school, where he was the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. While a summer associate in 1989 at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin, Obama had met Chicago native Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer at the firm. The two married in 1992.

After receiving his law degree, Obama moved to Chicago and became active in the Democratic Party. He organized Project Vote, a drive that registered tens of thousands of African Americans on voting rolls and that is credited with helping Democrat Bill Clinton win Illinois and capture the presidency in 1992. The effort also helped make Carol Moseley Braun, an Illinois state legislator, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. During this period, Obama wrote his first book and saw it published. The memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995), is the story of Obamas search for his biracial identity by tracing the lives of his now-deceased father and his extended family in Kenya. Obama lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago and worked as an attorney on civil rights issues.

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Barack Obama | biography - president of United States ...

President Obama won a big victory for his trade agenda Friday with the Senates approval of fast-track legislation that could make it easier for him to complete a wide-ranging trade deal that would include 11 Pacific Rim nations.

A coalition of 48 Senate Republicans and 14 Democrats voted for Trade Promotion Authority late Friday, sending the legislation to a difficult fight in the House, where it faces more entrenched opposition from Democrats.

The Senate coalition fought off several attempts by opponents to undermine the legislation, defeating amendments that were politically popular but potentially poisonous to Obamas bid to secure the trade deal.

This is an important bill, likely the most important bill we will pass this year. Its important to President Obama, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and primary author of the bill, said at the close of debate.

TPAs fast-track provisions would allow Congress, under strict timelines, to consider trade deals with a simple up-or-down vote without any amendments or requirements of a Senate super-majority to end debate. That would help Obama complete the final details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), with the other 11 nations, a bloc that represents about 40 percent of the global economy.

The Senate passed bipartisan legislation Friday to strengthen the administration's hand in global trade talks. The vote was 62-37. (AP)

If TPA clears Congress, Obamas negotiators will push to conclude the Pacific trade pact and then send it to Congress for final approval, possibly later this year or early next year. The legislative package also includes new funding for labor training for workers that are certified for having lost their jobs because of foreign competition.

Obamas aggressive push for the trade agenda has upended his relationship with his long-standing allies in the labor movement, as well as anti-corporate liberal activists who strongly supported his 2008 and 2012 elections. It sparked sharp exchanges, played out in the national media, with a liberal icon, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), leading to one of Obamas normally closest allies, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), to question whether he was being sexist for singling her out for criticism.

Unions and progressive activists have mobilized their forces against TPA for more than a year now, believing that defeating the fast-track authority would probably also kill negotiations on the Pacific trade deal.

On Friday, union leaders narrowly lost their bid for passage of an amendment designed to create strict regulation of global currency markets, offered by Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), whose states have been ravaged by losses of manufacturing jobs to foreign competition.

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Obama wins trade victory in the Senate - The Washington Post

First lady Michelle Obama welcomed President Obama to Twitter Tuesday night with some impressive moves in a slick new workout video, "FLOTUS-style." As part of her Let's Move! program's #Gimmefive challenge, the First Lady showed off five ways to exercise and stay healthy.

While many have taken the opportunity to greet President Obama's arrival on Twitter:

Few have been quite so inspirational.

Commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Let's Move! program, the #Gimmefive challenge is an effort to "encourage Americans across the country to give out high-fives when they see someone making healthy choices," and to list five things they are doing "to eat better, be more active, and lead a healthier life," according to the Let's Move! website. First lady Michelle Obama started the Let's Move! initiative five years ago as a way to combat childhood obesity and promote healthy habits.

Between jumping rope, lifting weights, and boxing, maybe now we know how Obama got those famously sculpted arms.

Your move, POTUS.

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Michelle Obama welcomes POTUS to Twitter with video ...