President Barack Obama accused Congress on Monday of putting politics ahead of the country and called on voters to tell lawmakers to cut it out, as he kicked off a three-day Midwestern bus tour aimed at promoting his economic ideas and countering Republican attacks.

"You've got to send a message to Washington that it's time for the games to stop, it's time to put country first," Obama said at a town hall-style meeting on the first stop of his tour through Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.

"If you can do the right thing, then folks in Washington have to do the right thing," the president said. "And if we do that, there is not a problem that we face that we cannot solve."

Obama is making the first bus trip of his presidency through a region that helped launch him to the White House in 2008, and where Republican presidential hopefuls are now battling it out. It comes on the heels of Republican Michele Bachmann's weekend victory in the Iowa Straw Poll _ and after the president spent much of the summer holed up in the nation's capital enmeshed in bitterly partisan negotiations on the debt crisis that cratered his approval ratings and those of Congress amid a faltering economy and high unemployment.

Eager to get out of Washington, Obama struck a casual tone, ditching his suit and tie for a sports coat and khakis for the open-air event.