WASHINGTON — Saddled with a slowdown in hiring, President Barack Obama is drawing attention to the auto industry’s rebound, visiting a Chrysler plant in politically important Ohio as he seeks to highlight a rare bright spot in the sluggish economic recovery.

Obama was traveling to Toledo today, making the latest in a string of domestic trips to promote his economic agenda and defend the much maligned government bailouts to Chrysler and General Motors. The president planned to speak to plant workers and local business owners about the significance of the industry’s turnaround.

The trip comes on the same day that the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a significant drop in hiring for May — only 54,000 new jobs — and an uptick in unemployment to 9.1 percent. As the Republican presidential field begins to take shape, the White House is keenly aware that Obama’s handling of the economy generates some of his highest public disapproval ratings.

“We have said from the beginning that the road out of the dark place we were in when this president took office in terms of the economic recession, the depths of the recession we were in, was not going to be smooth every step of the way,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

The auto industry is also a major employer in presidential battleground states like Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri, all of them important for Obama’s re-election prospects. The industry recovery also gives Obama the opportunity to distinguish himself from Republicans who had criticized the government’s intervention.

Among them was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who had called for Chrysler and GM to go through bankruptcy without government assistance. Romney today defended his position. “The right process for an enterprise in trouble is not to be given money by the taxpayers in a bailout,” he told CBS’s “The Early Show.”