The route of President Obama’s national jobs tour can be traced through a familiar list of electoral battleground states that have been regular travel destinations for a White House under fire for blurring the line between presidential duties and political events.
To sell his nearly $450 billion jobs package, Obama went to Virginia last week, to Ohio on Tuesday and to North Carolina on Wednesday — each a purple state with high political stakes for the president.
The White House insists the trips are more about policy than politics. Republicans counter that Obama is behaving like a “campaigner-in-chief.”
But some analysts say that Obama would be foolish not to devote most of his time to the states most critical to his re-election next year.
“I think everybody realizes we have pretty much entered into the political season,” said Martin Medhurst, a presidential communication expert at Baylor University. “I think people pretty much accept this is the way that politics are played today.”
Since taking office, roughly half of Obama’s official trips were made to the 13 states most closely contested in 2008. Travel records show he uses battleground states for policy events and liberal bastions for fundraisers, while mostly ignoring solid red states.
Using the standard espoused by White House press secretary Jay Carney that the “most valuable commodity that exists in the West Wing is the president’s time” — and not including neighboring Virginia and Maryland — Obama has invested the most political capital in donor-rich New York and the battlegrounds of Ohio and Pennsylvania. He made 13 trips or more to each.
Obama hasn’t traveled at all to nine heavily Republican states or the liberal stronghold of Vermont.
Pointing to his travel schedule, Republicans assert that Obama is more concerned with winning re-election than turning around an economy with a 9.1 percent unemployment rate.
“The president is hitting the road this week in a political attempt to sell his package of old ideas,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. “I don’t think anyone should be surprised that he’s not stopping in North Dakota and Montana and Nebraska.”
Administration officials, however, contend that the president will visit a variety of states in coming weeks — not just swing states — in making the case for his jobs agenda.
Obama could use the jobs tour to rally his base supporters, liberal voters who have called on him to take a more active role in creating jobs. But his need to court those voters does not bode well for his re-election, Medhurst said.
“That’s a very bad sign for the Democratic campaign if you have to shore up your base 12 months before the election,” he said.
Obama over the past three months traveled repeatedly to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa. He went on a bus tour through the Midwest last month that coincided with a marquee Republican presidential debate and straw poll in the Hawkeye state. As official visits, such trips are completely funded by taxpayers.
Obama tried to turn the tables on Republicans Tuesday, accusing them of putting their own re-election concerns ahead of the country’s needs, particularly his new jobs package.
“The next election is 14 months away and the American people don’t have the luxury of waiting that long,” he said. “What on Earth are we waiting for?”
