After President Obama delivered his first State of the Union address, administration members broadcasted the president’s top priority:  unemployment.

However, the administration is not ignoring health care despite the president’s failure to mention the restructuring until nearly halfway into his speech, Vice President Joe Biden told “Good Morning America (GMA)”.

“The beginning of the speech was to remind everybody not to blame, but to remind everybody what we had to do the first year,” Biden said.  “We inherited an awful lot, and the president basically said, ‘Look, we had a lot to do and now that we got things stabilized, now is the time to focus on jobs.’”

Obama said last night that unemployment will be his first priority this year, and he promised to continue to push health care laws despite recent political setbacks.

“Jobs must be our number one focus in 2010,” the president said.

It is an objective that many Republicans are praising and saying is long overdue.

“We lost a year,” former Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney said on “GMA.”  “Instead of focusing on jobs, [Obama] focused on health care and a host of other things.  … The portions of his speech last night that dealt with jobs were encouraging — there are a number of things that I think you’ll see Republicans say ‘absolutely.’”

Obama’s call for a new labor bill drew bipartisan support from the members of Congress seated before him in the House chamber.  Obama dedicated approximately two-thirds of his address to the economy and domestic policy issues as he attempted to assure a skeptical U.S. public that his agenda is the correct method to fix the country’s economic problems.

The president admitted mistakes made in his first year, but he was adamant that he could keep the promises he made to the American people.

“I campaigned on the promise of change — ‘change we can believe in,’ the slogan went.  And right now, I know there are many Americans who aren’t sure if they still believe we can change — or at least, that I can deliver it,” Obama said.  “But remember this — I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I can do it alone.”

It is because fo the American people’s “resilience in the face of adversity” that the president said he has “never been more hopeful” about the nation’s future than he is tonight.

“Despite our hardships, our union is strong,” he said.

cf http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/State_of_the_Union/state-union-joe-biden-mitt-romney-hail-obama/story?id=9686090