US President Obama is in India

President Barack Obama arrived in Mumbai, India, on Saturday, beginning a 10-day, four-country Asia trip that will take him through some of the region's most vibrant democracies in a search for U.S. economic and security benefits.

Air Force One touched down in this booming financial center around midday after traveling more than 15 hours from Washington with the president and his wife, Michelle, aboard.

The president was to pay respects at a memorial to victims of the 2008 terror attacks here and visit a home Gandhi once lived in before turning to the focus of his first day in India: U.S. jobs.

Obama was set to speak to American and Indian business leaders and was expected to announce trade and export deals worth billions to the U.S. In the wake of the Democrats' devastating midterm losses, attributed in part to the poor state of the U.S. economy, the White House is intent on highlighting concrete benefits to U.S. consumers from Obama's foray overseas.

"It is hard to overstate the importance of Asia to our economic future," the president wrote Saturday in an op-ed in The New York Times.

The president left Washington shortly after the government reported that the economy added 151,000 jobs in October. It wasn't enough to lower the 9.6 percent jobless rate and the president said it wasn't good enough.

On his foreign trip, the longest of his presidency so far, Obama's business-first message is aimed particularly at India, where he is spending three full days. That's the longest amount of time in any one country on a trip that's also taking him to Indonesia, where he lived for four years as a youth, to South Korea for a meeting of the Group of 20 developed and developing nations and then to Japan for an American Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

The White House is going to great lengths to bring attention to the economic potential and shared democratic values that define its relationship with India and its 1.2 billion residents.

Briefing reporters aboard Air Force One, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said Obama intends the trip to be "a full embrace of India's rise." Said Donilon: "There's no more powerful way to do that than a presidential trip."

Indian officials said Obama's visit underscored the close ties that have developed between the two nations over the past 10 years after decades of wary relations.

"I don't think there's an area of human endeavor in which we do not actually cooperate," said Shivshankar Menon, India's national security adviser. "We work together in innovation. We work together in technology. We create jobs in each other's economy. When you look at the political military side as well, we work together on national security, on counterterrorism, defense."

But serious disagreements remain, and they appear unlikely to be resolved during Obama's visit.

India has raised concerns about the billions of dollars in military aid the U.S. is funneling to Pakistan, which is India's archrival but a linchpin for Washington and its allies in the war in Afghanistan. Leaders here also are wary of the increasing rhetoric by U.S. politicians against the outsourcing of jobs abroad, including to India.