Obama Team Turns Its Focus to Tough Re-election Fight
By JACKIE CALMES and HELENE COOPER
NYT
WASHINGTON — After a month tied down in Washington by the bruising budget fight, President Obama breaks out to four battleground states this week and next, including a campaign-style bus tour in the Upper Midwest, stumping with a new urgency as global economic fears darken his re-election prospects.
Fifteen months from Election Day, Mr. Obama is gearing up his re-election effort with unemployment stuck above 9 percent, economic growth faltering, financial markets gyrating and faith in Washington depressed by the partisan debt limit fight. Now the creditworthiness of government bonds has been downgraded for the first time ever by one of the ratings agencies — a development with symbolic meaning as well as potential practical impact.
Mr. Obama’s approval ratings are below 50 percent in electoral battlegrounds like Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to recent polls there. His party’s political infrastructure has been weakened in crucial states where Republicans won statehouses last year, though the White House sees potential benefit in a reaction to the unpopular policies of new Republican governors in states like Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Despite an intensive effort by the White House since last November to recapture the political center, Mr. Obama continues to struggle to win back the support of moderate and independent voters, polls show. Having won with their help in 2008 in states where Democrats for years had not seriously competed — Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia and some mountain states — Mr. Obama will now have to struggle not just to duplicate that feat but also to prevail in traditional swing states like Pennsylvania.
(More here.)
NYT
WASHINGTON — After a month tied down in Washington by the bruising budget fight, President Obama breaks out to four battleground states this week and next, including a campaign-style bus tour in the Upper Midwest, stumping with a new urgency as global economic fears darken his re-election prospects.
Fifteen months from Election Day, Mr. Obama is gearing up his re-election effort with unemployment stuck above 9 percent, economic growth faltering, financial markets gyrating and faith in Washington depressed by the partisan debt limit fight. Now the creditworthiness of government bonds has been downgraded for the first time ever by one of the ratings agencies — a development with symbolic meaning as well as potential practical impact.
Mr. Obama’s approval ratings are below 50 percent in electoral battlegrounds like Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to recent polls there. His party’s political infrastructure has been weakened in crucial states where Republicans won statehouses last year, though the White House sees potential benefit in a reaction to the unpopular policies of new Republican governors in states like Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Despite an intensive effort by the White House since last November to recapture the political center, Mr. Obama continues to struggle to win back the support of moderate and independent voters, polls show. Having won with their help in 2008 in states where Democrats for years had not seriously competed — Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia and some mountain states — Mr. Obama will now have to struggle not just to duplicate that feat but also to prevail in traditional swing states like Pennsylvania.
(More here.)
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