Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, want him to maintain a pragmatic strategy of appealing to independent voters by advocating ideas that can pass Congress, even if they may not have much economic impact. These include free trade agreements and improved patent protections for inventors.
But others, including Gene Sperling, Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, say public anger over the debt ceiling debate has weakened Republicans and created an opening for bigger ideas like tax incentives for businesses that hire more workers, according to Congressional Democrats who share that view. Democrats are also pushing the White House to help homeowners facing foreclosure.
Even if the ideas cannot pass Congress, they say, the president would gain a campaign issue by pushing for them.
“The president’s team puts a premium on being above the partisan fray, which is usually the right strategy,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate. “But on this issue, when he knows what the right thing to do is, and when a rather small group on one side is blocking any progress, you have to be willing to call that group out if you want to get anything done.”
The debate is being framed by the 2012 election. Administration officials, frustrated by the intransigence of House Republicans, have increasingly concluded that the best thing Mr. Obama can do for the economy may be winning a second term, with a mandate to advance his ideas on deficit reduction, entitlement changes, housing policy and other issues.
Obama won a clean sweep in 2008 of Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan, a region that has supported Democratic presidential candidates since 2000, except for President George W. Bush’s narrow victory in Iowa in 2004.
But Obama’s standing in these states, as elsewhere, has grown precarious as the economy has slumped.
Republican governors are now in charge in three of those five states, and Obama’s approval rating, as measured by Gallup, is hovering around 50 percent in most of the region.
“We got a president who got a decrease in the credit rating of our nation, and that’s because our president simply doesn’t understand how to lead and how to grow an economy,” Republican hopeful Mitt Romney said in Thursday’s Iowa debate.
Romney and his GOP rivals blamed Obama for the growth of the federal deficit and the credit downgrade by Standard and Poor’s, the first in the nation’s history.
The GOP race intensified with Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s entry Saturday. When Obama arrives at a town-hall meeting in Decorah, Iowa, on Monday afternoon, Perry intends to meet with voters in eastern Iowa, about 100 miles away.
Nationally, Obama’s approval rating is comparable to President Ronald Reagan’s ratings in August 1983. But recent Gallup polls indicated that Obama’s approval rating was hovering between 44 percent and 49 percent in 10 states closely watched by his political advisers. Those states include Iowa, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida.
Obama’s standing with independents, who helped him win in traditionally Republican states such as Indiana and North Carolina, has fallen, too.
“The country is in an unbelievably angry mood,” said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.
Most presidents like to get away from the nations’ capital, and this excursion couldn’t come at a better time.
As a candidate, Obama said he would tame Washington’s gridlock. Yet it was political paralysis that scuttled his quest for a “grand bargain” with congressional Republicans on increasing the country’s borrowing limit and forced him to agree to smaller spending cuts without higher taxes on the rich, as he demanded.
The Federal Reserve said Tuesday that economic growth had been “considerably slower” than expected this year and outlined a glum forecast. Obama will have a tough sales job on the road. Unemployment is high, foreclosures are rampant and Wall Street is jittery.
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