Obama looks for heartland comfort

www.politico.com

FORT MADISON, Iowa – President Barack Obama hearts the heartland.

But does it still love him?

Veteran White House CBS News radio reporter Mark Knoller shouted to the president across a massive mold for a wind turbine at the Siemens plant here, wanting to know why he had chosen Iowa for a daylong campaign-style, chopper-and-motorcade green jobs tour.

“Because I love Iowa!” enthused Obama, who thought so much of the line that he repeated it to about 200 workers and invited guests, including Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, who gathered in the shadows of the giant blades that resembled a flotilla of beached sloops.

“If it wasn’t for Iowa, I wouldn’t have been president,” Obama added, alluding to his landmark 2008 win in the Iowa caucuses that bounced Hillary Clinton from her perch as the Democratic frontrunner.

“I wanted to come here to talk with folks like you about the economic hardship and the pain that this town has gone through and so many people are still feeling is important,” Obama added. “But it’s also to talk about the economic potential.”

Obama carried the state in the general election, too. But his approval rating has declined steadily, and he now sits around 46 percent in polls.

White House spokesman Bill Burton shrugged off a question on whether the two-day trip of the recession-wracked rural heartland was an unofficial 2012 kick-off.

“God, I hope not,” said Burton, who then articulated a pretty solid strategy for winning Iowa, Missouri and Illinois – the three Midwestern states that Obama is visiting this week.

“We're on our way to Iowa, a place where the president has spent a lot of time over the course of the last couple of years,” Burton told reporters on Air Force One.

In speeches at the plant and later, at a community college in Ottumwa, Iowa, Obama struck themes he hopes will resonate with a middle-American public skeptical of bailouts, health care reform and gargantuan deficits. If Obama capitalized on public discontent with the Bush White House in 2008, he was attempting to defuse hostility towards his own administration six months before this fall’s midterm elections.

At the Siemens plant, he was sure to tick off the good news: It opened four years ago on the site of an abandoned factory, has grown to employ 609 workers, thanks, in part to $3.5 million in subsidies from the U.S. Energy Department.

But if the trip was intended to burnish Obama’s reputation – and make the case that his effort to jumpstart the economy has actually worked, it also seemed to lighten his own mood.

He made two side trips – one to an organic farm, where he delved into the mysteries of onions and blackberries and later leapt from his motorcade in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, to greet a few dozen well-wishers.

Relaxed and strolling in shirtsleeves, Obama popped by Jerry's restaurant on Route 218 in Mt. Pleasant, taking the afternoon crew by surprise.

One of the workers immediately called his wife, who didn’t believe him. So, he handed the phone to former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, now the U.S. secretary of agriculture, who was part of the entourage, to confirm Obama had indeed ambled in.

After chatting with a gray haired patron, Obama asked his staff if he could stay for a cup of coffee and began scanning a chalkboard over the kitchen that listed all the available pies: custard, chocolate, coconut, lemon, rhubarb, pecan, cherry, apple, peach and butterscotch.

“Let’s see,” Obama said. “Rhubarb...and a cup of coffee.”

When someone offered to brew a fresh pot, the president, who had two dozen motorcade vehicles idling outside, said he’d take what was already at hand.

He then motioned to the reporters and said that one of the Iowans inside had told him, “They can leave.”

And they did.

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