Politics
Obama heads to Ohio as campaign begins to warm up
US President Barack Obama. AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain
President Barack Obama is pushing his economic message in Ohio, brandishing his presidential megaphone in a politically important state to make certain his appeal to the middle class is heard amid the boisterous start of the Republican campaign for the White House.
Obama was traveling Wednesday to the most Democratic congressional district in Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, a day after Mitt Romney won Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses by just eight votes. Obama’s trip signals the White House’s intent to keep the president in the public eye even as the political world focuses on the GOP’s selection process.
The White House’s choice of Ohio for Obama’s first presidential trip of 2012 underscores the state’s high-profile role in presidential politics. It is a swing state that went for George W. Bush in 2004 and for Obama in 2008. A top manufacturing state, Ohio has seen its jobless rate follow the national pattern; unemployment was 8.5 percent in November compared with 9.6 percent a year before.
Obama set the tone Tuesday for a White House strategy that aims to maintain pressure on congressional Republicans while promoting an economic plan that serves as much as a policy prescription as it does a political platform for the general election.
Addressing Iowa Democrats by teleconference as the GOP caucus counting was still under way, Obama described Republicans as embracing a “theory that says we’re going to cut taxes for the wealthiest among us and roll back regulations on things like clean air and health care reform, Wall Street reform, and somehow that automatically that assures that everybody is able to succeed.”
“I don’t believe that,” Obama declared.
Pressing his economic agenda, Obama has said expanding the middle class is “the defining issue of our time.” His spokesman, Jay Carney, on Tuesday called it “his No. 1 focus.”
As defined by the president and by his advisers, his economic argument is that the middle class is facing a “make or break moment.” On that score, Obama still has a few confrontations with Congress in the year ahead.
