U.S. President Barack Obama is launching a three-state midwestern bus tour aimed at answering criticism that he has not done enough to improve the ailing economy.
The president begins the tour in St. Paul, Minnesota, Monday. He holds a town hall meeting (at 1:05 p.m. EDT) in the town of Cannon Falls, south of St. Paul, expected to focus on ways to create jobs and accelerate economic growth.
The president travels on to the state of Iowa, where he is to hold a second town hall in the town of Decorah (at 6:15 p.m. EDT) on Monday. The White House says participants at the two meetings will include small business owners, local families, private sector leaders, rural organizations, and government officials. Mr. Obama visits Illinois later this week.
The president's approval rating fell after the recent downgrade of the U.S. credit rating and the debt ceiling battle with Congress.
A recent Gallup poll indicated only 39 percent of Americans approve of the president's job performance, an all-time low for Obama.
The president’s itinerary will give him a heartland backdrop for his message, taking him past small family farms and through fly-speck towns with names like Alpha, Ill., (population, 671). In Cannon Falls, a riverside town in southern Minnesota, Mr. Obama will take part in a town-hall-style meeting in a park.
Other stops include a visit to Seed Savers, a group in Decorah, Iowa, that preserves and trades heirloom seeds; a rural economic forum in Peosta, Iowa; and two more town-hall-style meetings in Alpha and Atkinson, Ill.
The trip will also put Mr. Obama on stage in places where the Republican campaign for the presidential nomination is heating up. Ames, Iowa, just held a straw poll on Saturday that was won by Representative Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota.
After being hunkered down in Washington hammering out the deal on the debt ceiling for much of the summer, Mr. Obama has been eager to hit the road. Last week, he traveled to a factory in Holland, Mich., where he delivered a hard-edged critique of the role House Republicans played in the debt talks.
Mr. Obama also plans to present his own ideas for creating jobs — a familiar menu that includes extending the cut in payroll taxes and pushing for Congressional approval of trade agreements with South Korea and Panama.
White House officials said Mr. Obama did not plan to roll out major new economic initiatives on the trip, though his advisors were busy developing plans that might be introduced later. But the tour will give the president the chance to make his case to the public that the partisan warfare in Washington must end.
“The American people voted for a divided government, but they did not vote for a dysfunctional government,” said Josh Earnest, the deputy White House press secretary, repeating one of his boss’s stock phrases. “And I think that has left the president pretty frustrated.”
Mr. Earnest acknowledged that Mr. Obama expected to encounter some anger about the economy and the discord in Washington from people he meets on the road, though Mr. Earnest pinned the blame for that mainly on Republicans, whom he said “put their partisan affiliation ahead of the country.”
Though the five Congressional districts that Mr. Obama is visiting are solidly Republican, he carried four of them in 2008, losing only Minnesota’s Second District by a narrow margin. The upper Midwest will be a crucial electoral battleground in 2012.
Unlike last week’s trip to Michigan, the bus tour this week will not take the president to regions particularly hard hit by the economic downturn. The National Journal noted that the four counties on his itinerary have lower unemployment rates than the national average, with Winneshiek County in Iowa the lowest, at 5.9 percent.
These towns, the Journal noted, have weathered the bad times relatively well because they have a mix of light manufacturing and agriculture, rather than heavy industry or ravaged industries like construction.
Mr. Obama wraps up his tour in Illinois on Wednesday and returns to the White House, before leaving Thursday for a 10-day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. His aides insist he will stick to his plans, regardless of calls by some Republicans for him to stay in Washington to work on the economy.
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