Obama Rolls Out Midterm Metaphor/In Ohio, two races test Democrats' strategy for midterm elections

Obama Rolls Out Midterm Metaphor
By HELENE COOPER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/us/politics/18obama.html?hpw


SEATTLE — In road-testing his stump speech for the midterm elections, President Obama would like American voters to think of a car that has been driven into a ditch. (Take a wild guess who was at the wheel.)

“You had a group of folks who drove the economy, drove the country, drove our car into the ditch,” Mr. Obama told some 200 party faithful sipping sauvignon blanc by the pool Monday night at a Los Angeles fund-raiser.

The president may change a word here or refer to a different member of Congress there, but the basic arc of the anecdote has been the same at his stops so far this week on a three-day, five-state swing.

The White House wants to frame the November elections as a clear choice between the Democrats who have put the country on the road to recovery, anemic though it may be, and the Republicans who, in the White House view, got the country into the economic mess to begin with.

“We put on our boots and walked into the ditch — it’s muddy and hot and dusty and bugs everywhere — and we’re pushing,” Mr. Obama said of the efforts of the White House and its Democratic partners in Congress.

“And we’re slipping and sliding and sweating, and the other side, the Republicans, they’re standing there with their Slurpees watching us,” Mr. Obama said, building up to the punch line, which he has been refining (minus the Slurpees) for several months. “Finally we get this car to level ground. Finally we’re ready to move forward, go down that road once again to American prosperity, and what happens? They want the keys back.”

“Well, you can’t have the keys back,” he said to cheers in Milwaukee on Monday. “You don’t know how to drive. You got us into the ditch.”

It is not an easy sales pitch, in no small part because Republicans have countered that Mr. Obama’s stimulus spending and health care and financial overhauls are slowing the recovery and keeping the unemployment rate high.

Indeed, far from running from it, Republicans are embracing the obstructionist label that Mr. Obama has been using liberally.

When White House officials started pointing out to reporters recent remarks by the Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, that he wished Republicans had been able to obstruct more, Mr. McConnell’s office fired off e-mails standing behind the remarks.

“Like most Americans, Senate Republicans opposed a government takeover of health care, a bill that nearly every week we learn won’t reduce health care costs for families, but will take a half-trillion dollars out of Medicare while kicking seniors off the plans they like and raising taxes on small business,” Don Stewart, Mr. McConnell’s spokesman, wrote in an e-mail.

The president and the minority leader have also tangled over legislation to give small businesses a variety of tax breaks and incentives, including easier access to loans. “They won’t even let it go to a vote,” Mr. Obama said in Seattle.

Republicans counter that the bill is misguided and costly, and that it will not help small businesses. And they blame the Democrats for delaying a vote on it.

“From the beginning,” an e-mail from Mr. Stewart said, “this bill clearly wasn’t a priority to them until they realized that they didn’t have anything to talk about when they go home in August.”

White House officials nonetheless expressed optimism Tuesday that the effort to frame the midterm elections as a battle between hope and obstructionism would be successful.

Mr. Obama’s speechwriter, Jon Favreau, was traveling with him on the three-day swing as the president worked on his message, and the two men have tossed ideas back and forth over what works and what does not. The “you can’t drive” anecdote, which made its debut as just two lines in a speech a few months ago, has increasingly found favor with the president as audiences have responded to it, administration officials said.

Of course, on this trip, Mr. Obama has been preaching to the choir.

“You notice that when you move forward in your car, you put it in ‘D’; when you want to go backwards, you put it in ‘R?’ ” Mr. Obama said to wild cheers in Seattle, where, for the first time, he pantomimed drinking a Slurpee as he caricatured his Republican opponents. “Back into that ditch! Keep that in mind in November. That’s not a coincidence.”

Jokes aside, the effort to position Congressional Democrats as more concerned about the economy than their Republican counterparts is crucial to Mr. Obama’s hopes that his party will retain control of Congress in November. With that goal in mind, Mr. Obama is trying to harness the success of his 2008 drive toward the White House.

“You remember our slogan during the campaign — ‘Yes, we can?’ ” Mr. Obama asked in Seattle. “Their slogan is, ‘No, we can’t.’ ”

Clearly enjoying himself, he started to grin. “It’s really inspiring, that vision they have for the future — gives you a little pep in your step when you hear it, doesn’t it?”

Crowding Air Force One

SEATTLE (AP) — The North American Aerospace Defense Command said Tuesday that military fighter jets were scrambled to respond to an air-space violation near Air Force One here.

John Cornelio, a spokesman, said the jets were sent from Portland, Ore., as the president was visiting here after a report that an aircraft had entered the restricted airspace. Mr. Cornelio said the aircraft left the restricted area before the Air National Guard jets arrived.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 18, 2010

An earlier version of this article erroneously identified Senator Mitch McConnell as the majority leader.




In Ohio, two races test Democrats' strategy for midterm elections
By Dan Balz
Copyright by The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/17/AR2010081705925.html?hpid=topnews


COLUMBUS, OHIO -- There could not be two better examples of what President Obama and the Democrats want the fall elections to be about than Ohio Republicans Rob Portman and John Kasich.

Portman, who is running for the Senate, was the chief trade officer and White House budget director for President George W. Bush. Kasich, a former congressman who is running for governor, spent a decade working for Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street firm whose collapse helped trigger the massive economic retraction.

Together, their races may provide the nation's clearest test of whether the Democrats' strategy of running against Bush and Wall Street can overcome a political climate tilted clearly toward the Republicans.

(Interactive: I-70 corridor battleground races)

Economic issues overwhelm everything else in Ohio, and Republicans are, at the moment, capitalizing on voter unhappiness. By November, Democrats must shift the focus of the debate if they are to hold down their losses here and across the country. Whether they can do so is the crucial question.

"It's a battle between present economic reality and past economic reality," John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, said of the two parties' strategies.

This election year has been described as the year of the outsider, when Washington connections are considered anathema to voters. Portman and Kasich, whose races are seen as tossups, run contrary to that assumption. And they are hardly the only Republicans whose profiles seem, at least on the surface, at odds with the mood of the electorate and thus more open to Democratic attacks.

Along the critical Interstate 70 corridor, which is home to some of the most competitive races in the country this year, Republicans have put forward a number of candidates who have either deep Washington connections or strong ties to past GOP administrations: In Indiana, former senator Dan Coats, who became a Washington lobbyist, is seeking the seat of retiring Sen. Evan Bayh (D). In Missouri, Rep. Roy Blunt, who was the Republican whip during Bush's presidency, is running for the Senate. In Iowa, Terry Branstad, who was governor for four terms in the 1980s and 1990s, is pursuing his old office.

The Democrats have made Kasich's and Portman's résumés central to their campaign messages, hammering Kasich for his Wall Street ties and calling Portman the architect of Bush's trade and economic policies.

"It's the largest divide in the country between two candidates running for the U.S. Senate," Portman's opponent, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher (D), said of the differences between him and his rival. "The divide is as deep as this economic recession is."

But Republicans believe that, as much as Democrats try to make the midterms a choice between Obama's and Bush's philosophies, in the end the election will be a referendum on the president at a time of deep voter discontent.

"I suppose it's relevant to some people," Portman said when asked whether what happened when Republicans were in power should be a leading issue in this campaign. But he said the Obama administration's policies in combating the recession are more pertinent for voters. "The question is, was the stimulus a good idea? Has it worked?" he said. "Is the health-care bill a good idea? Has it worked?"


Politically, Ohio remains a bellwether. The state helped seal Bush's victories in 2000 and 2004. But in 2006, Ted Strickland became Ohio's first Democratic governor in 16 years. Two years ago, Obama carried Ohio by four percentage points, the first time since 1996 that a Democrat won the state.

Since the election of Strickland, who is running against Kasich for a second term, Ohio has been hit hard by the recession. Its unemployment rate of 10.5 percent is among the 10 highest in the country. Over the past four years, the state has lost more than 300,000 jobs. Strickland, like other governors, has been forced to cut services to keep the budget in balance. Worries about the economy overwhelm all other issues. Today, more people disapprove of Obama's handling of the presidency than approve.

The economy's impact

Absent such enormous economic troubles, Green said, Strickland would be able to capitalize on his incumbency -- and Fisher on his name recognition as lieutenant governor -- against two candidates who have never campaigned statewide. "What the job situation has done," Green said, "is remove some of those natural advantages that incumbents or prominent state officials would have in an election."

Strickland still has one advantage: Obama will be in Ohio on Wednesday to raise money for him.

Kasich, who was House Budget Committee chairman and a top lieutenant to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) before working for Lehman, is trying to pin responsibility for the recession and its aftermath on Strickland.

"When you're the CEO of a company, and they give you a chance and you fail, they fire you, okay?" Kasich said after a campaign event in Portsmouth, in economically depressed southern Ohio.

But Strickland said others bear the blame for the state's plight. "What I'm saying to the people of Ohio is we're dealing with a recession not of our own making," he said in a telephone interview. "Frankly, a recession caused more by Wall Street greed than anything in Ohio."

Kasich's Wall Street connections have become a flash point in the race. Outside groups have run ads attacking Kasich and noting that Lehman's collapse cost the state's public pension funds nearly $500 million. "John Kasich got rich while Ohio seniors lost millions," one ad says.

Kasich responds in one of his ads by saying: "I didn't run Lehman Brothers. I was one of 700 managing directors. I worked in a two-man office in Columbus."

Kasich said in an interview that he addressed the charges about his Lehman Brothers role not because they were hurting his campaign, but merely to satisfy supporters who worried that he was failing to respond to an attack. "It was more talking points for them," he said.

Blaming him for Lehman's problems, he added, "would be like blaming a car dealer here . . . for the collapse of General Motors. You know, people want answers. They don't want smears."

He also played down his influence within the firm. "I was one of a lot of employees," he said. "I was not in a position to go in and start banging on the door. I didn't even know what was going on until it all unfolded."

Asked whether the government should have bailed out Lehman Brothers, he said: "That's yesterday's news and all that. But look, the whole thing was a mess and they went down and it's over, and it hurt a lot of people, including me, and that's the end of the story."

Looking back to Bush

In the Senate race, Fisher advisers say Ohioans see Bush's trade and economic policies as the primary cause of the state's economic problems. Portman "wasn't just along for the ride, a casual passerby," Fisher charges. "He was actually one of the chief architects of the trade and economic policies that got us into this mess."

Portman does not seem eager to spend the rest of the campaign talking about the past, arguing that "it's an odd campaign to be running against the past rather than providing a vision for the future. And we're going to be providing a vision for the future, [because] that's where people are."

As for his days in the Bush administration, he notes that until he arrived as budget director, Bush had never vetoed a spending bill. "We should have done it years earlier," he said.

His record as U.S. trade representative, Portman said, was one of promoting exports. "Ohio is dependent on exports," he said. "Twenty-five percent of Ohio's factory jobs are now export jobs. One out of every three acres is planted for exports in Ohio. Farmers are dependent on it."

He also argues that he is a strong advocate for tougher enforcement of existing trade agreements and has been critical of the Obama administration for not responding more to China on currency valuations. "I'm stronger on enforcement than the administration," he said.

For Fisher, the question is whether he will have the resources to air enough commercials to make the argument about Portman's Bush administration role loudly enough to affect the race. Portman holds a sizable fundraising advantage at this point, and Democrats are worried.

Democrats privately express more confidence about holding the governor's mansion. Republicans are confident they can win both, so long as they keep the race focused on the economy, Obama and the Democrats.