For a few moments, President Barack Obama sounded like he was channeling the demanding Professor Charles Kingsfield, the fictional imperious law scholar of the "The Paper Chase" today, when he gave his opening remarks at Thursday's White House jobs summit.

He put the business people, academics and union officials on notice that warm and fuzzy generalities wouldn't do, he wanted nothing less than for them to wow him with superbly detailed ideas for rekindling hiring in the U.S.

True, a lot of people probably thought that was the president's job. But if he had all the answers, he wouldn't have needed to hold the summit, would he?

Obama said:

Now, let me be clear. I am open to every demonstrably good idea, and I want to take every responsible step to accelerate job creation. We also, though, have to face the fact that our resources are limited. When we walked in, there was an enormous fiscal gap between the money that is going out and the money coming in. The recession has made that worse because of fewer tax receipts and more demands made on government for things like unemployment insurance.

So we can't make any ill-considered decisions right now, even with the best of intentions. We're going to have to be surgical and we're going to have to be creative. We're going to have to be smart and strategic. We'll need to look beyond the old standbys and fallbacks and come up with the best ideas that give us the biggest bang for the buck.

So I need everybody here to bring their A-game here today. I'm going to be asking some tough questions. I will be listening for some good answers. And I don't want to just brainstorm up at 30,000 feet. I want details in our discussion today. I'm looking for specific recommendations that can be implemented that will spur on job growth as quickly as possible.