President Barack Obama?s summer Midwestern bus trek was about reconnecting with disaffected independents, but the North Carolina and Virginia road trip that starts Monday is a more narrowly targeted exercise in 2012 politics.
The three-day bus tour, with stops in rural towns, suburbs and several cities, literally traces an escape route for Obama?s reelection campaign through two states he carried in 2008 that are must-wins next year even if Obama succeeds in recapturing lost ground in more traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Florida.
Continue ReadingWhite House officials say they selected the speaking sites ? high schools, community colleges, a military base ? because they exemplify places that would benefit directly from Obama?s $447 billion jobs plan. And deputy press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Sunday that talking about the foray in a strictly political context comes from ?people in Washington D.C. who are eager to ascribe a political motive to everything the president does.?
Yet the trip?s itinerary suggests nothing so much as his 2012 game plan plotted onto a map of the Upper South and with the American Jobs Act, which polls well among all but the most conservative voters, as a selling point.
?The main goals for Obama in North Carolina really hold true for?Virginia too,? says Mileah Kromer, assistant director of the Elon University Poll, whose September poll found the president with a 42/51 percent approval/disapproval split in the Tar Heel state.
?First he needs to make sure black voters, who are the core here, are as motivated as they were last time,? says Kromer. ?Second, he needs to reach out to working-class whites, who he?s totally lost. Third, he?s got to generate some kind of enthusiasm among liberals?who are his volunteer and donor base.?
With that in mind, here?s a look at the political rationale behind the president?s schedule:
Asheville, N.C. (Monday)
Why? To rev up support among white liberals and high-education migrants from the Northeast.
Obama?s bus trip doesn?t include North Carolina?s two biggest cities, Charlotte and Raleigh, which he won by 24 and 15 points in 2008 on the strength of large and highly-motivated African-American communities. Instead, Air Force One will fly into Asheville - Berkeley-in-the-Blue Ridge, a spot of shiny liberal blue in a sea of fiery conservative red western North Carolina.
Asheville only has 80,000 people but it?s an important bastion of white progressives, an arts hub and home to a half dozen universities that were hotbeds of support during the Hope-and-Change era. As such, it?s a convenient stand-in for the state?s much larger progressive heartland: the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill ?Triangle,? a much more important basket of Obama support in 2012.
He?s going there to tout the $2 billion in airport renovation cash in his bill, and the crowd greeting him on the tarmac will be likely be adoring. But it?s not yet clear if the region?s Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler ? a conservative who has thumbed his nose at Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ? will pop by to say howdy.
Millers Creek, N.C. (Monday) and Jamestown, N.C. (Tuesday)
Why? To prove that even tea party Republicans want to avoid teacher layoffs.
On the conference call previewing the trip, one North Carolina print reporter asked a White House aide why the president would bother showing up in two small towns as microscopic as Millers Creek (pop. 2,071, 99% white) and Jamestown (pop. 3,088, 87% white) ? and why he?d set foot in two places so hostile to Obama (he got about 30 percent in Millers Creek, and lost Jamestown by a wide margin in 2008).
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