Note: On Tuesday, August 16th - White House officials today announced that President Barack Obama will host a rural economic forum on Tuesday, Aug. 16 at Northeast Iowa Community College.
The Democratic president and members of his cabinet plan to visit the college in Peosta as part of a three-day Midwestern bus tour.
The forum will include local business owners and rural development leaders to discuss ideas to spur the economy in small towns.
Obama was last in Iowa in June, visiting an aluminum manufacturing plant that had added jobs.
The latest visit will come on the heels of the Aug. 13 Republican presidential straw poll. That event is an early test of campaign strength in the leadoff caucus state for Obama’s would-be GOP challengers.
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August 15, 2011
Obama begins political counteroffensive in Midwest
Washington, President Barack Obama launches a political counteroffensive this week, weighed down by withering support among some of his most ardent backers, a stunted economy and a daily bashing from the slew of Republicans campaigning for his job.
“We’ve still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it’s going to take time to get out of it,” the president told the U.S. over the weekend, all but pleading for people to stick with him.
A deeply unsettled political landscape, with voters in a fiercely anti-incumbent mood, is framing the 2012 presidential race 15 months before Americans decide whether to give Obama a second term or hand power to the Republicans. Trying to ride out what seems to be an unrelenting storm of economic anxiety, people in the United States increasingly are voicing disgust with most all of the men and women, Obama included, they sent to Washington to govern them.
continues ..
With his approval numbers sliding, the Democratic president will try to ease their worries and sustain his resurrected fighting spirit when he sets off Monday on a bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. The trip is timed to dilute the buzz emanating from the Midwest after Republicans gathered in Iowa over the weekend for a first test of the party’s White House candidates. The state holds the nation’s first nominating test in the long road toward choosing Obama’s opponent.
“You have just sent a message that Barack Obama will be a one-term president,” Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann told elated supporters minutes after winning Saturday’s Iowa straw poll, essentially a fundraising event that also tests a candidate’s organizational and financial strength. She spent heavily and traveled throughout the state where she was born, casting herself as the evangelical Christian voice of the deeply conservative small-government, low-tax tea party wing of the party.
Obama, expecting the political shelling he would take, fired pre-emptively in his weekly radio and Internet address to the nation on Saturday. He told listeners that it was the Republicans running for president and serving in Congress who were at work crushing voters’ hopes and dreams.
The question for Obama and his backers remains: Will he sustain the counterattack? Of late, he’s been seen by even his most staunch supporters as too ready to retreat from critical ground when confronted by intransigent Republicans.
But Obama’s re-election could be in peril for lack of a strong message about what he will do to lift the country out of economic malaise and political deadlock.
In the face of that reality, Obama is tacking to put some wind in his re-election sails, apparently convinced that he can gather speed by turning up the attack on Congress.
“You’ve got a right to be frustrated,” the president said in his weekly address. “I am. Because you deserve better. I don’t think it’s too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering.”
He chastised Republicans for brinksmanship, saying “some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.”
In Iowa, Bachmann won narrowly over the libertarian-leaning Paul.
Even as Obama’s bus tour has designs on blunting the Iowa Republican festivities, it will have to compete for attention as the country digests Perry’s rhetorical assault on Obama’s presidency.
Perry, a former Democrat and the nation’s longest-serving governor, told his appreciative audience that Obama’s government had “an insatiable desire to spend our children’s inheritance.” He accused Obama of presiding over an “economic disaster” that has been “downgrading our hope for a better future.”
If nothing else, voters won’t be able to ignore the fact that Perry’s speaking style and swagger are eerily reminiscent of another Texas governor who made the transition to the national stage, President George W Bush. Both men were Air Force pilots.
Obama and the other Republican hopefuls now face daily scrutiny as well as they try to avoid the same kind of misstep. That’s a nearly impossible task in the long, arduous and expensive path toward the White House.
read full article @ http://www.japantoday.com/category/world/view/obama-begins-political-counteroffensive-in-midwest
