Decorah, Ia. – President Obama defended his compromises with Republicans and delivered a tongue lashing Monday to politicians who try to roadblock every move from his administration for the sake of making political hay.
“You know what? You guys didn’t send us there to be thinking about our jobs. You sent us there to be thinking about your jobs,” Obama said to a town hall meeting of about 600 people while standing in front of a red barn at Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit group that preserves heirloom plants.
Monday marked the first of three days Obama will spend in the Midwest. He’ll also stop in Peosta today and make several stops in his home state of Illinois on Wednesday.
The tour is focusing on how to help the middle class and accelerate job growth, typical topics for presidential trips. Obama Monday advocated for renewal of a 2 percent cut in payroll tax for workers and for an extension of unemployment benefits, which both expire Dec. 31.
But his opponents called the tour a taxpayer-funded campaign trip.
Republicans launched a tour of their own Monday called “Obama’s debt-end tour.” It includes web ads, videos and text messages to residents of the states he is visiting to remind people of what Republicans say are Obama’s economic failures.
“We’re not going to stand idly by while this president perpetrates this fraud of a bus tour while using taxpayer dollars to spin his failure to put America back to work,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Monday.
Obama faces challenging economic headwinds that range from the first-ever downgrade in the nation’s credit rating from Standard & Poor’s to 500-point or more market swings last week to concerns that the global market’s volatility signals another downturn like the one that began in 2008, before he took office.
Obama’s staff points to steps the administration has taken to improve the economy.
Last week, for example, the Federal House Administration began seeking input from investors about an idea to convert into rental units some of the 248,000 foreclosed homes that have government-controlled mortgages through companies like Fannie Mae. Empty homes contribute to depressed housing prices, and occupancy could help stabilize neighborhoods, federal officials said.
At the town hall meeting, Obama defended the compromises he’s made, which some members of his own party have faulted. A supporter, Emily Neal, 38, of Decorah told him that his negotiating tactics seemed to have cut away at his supporters’ trust by compromising key principles. One example: He yielded on his push to end tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
Obama responded that he temporarily compromised with Republicans to allow the tax breaks for wealthy families to continue because the agreement simultaneously allowed the nation to keep tax breaks for the middle class and extend unemployment benefits. Not keeping the other tax breaks would have further devastated the economy, he said.
“I know it’s frustrating, because the other side is unreasonable and you don’t want to reward unreasonableness,” Obama said. “I get that, but sometimes you’ve got to make choices in order to do what’s best for the country at that particular moment.” Obama’s approval rating in Iowa is at 49 percent, according to a Gallup Survey released Aug. 8. Iowa is important to Obama’s re-election because it’s been a swing state in recent presidential elections. Nationally, his approval is at 39 percent, the lowest since he took office, according another Gallup Survey released Sunday.
“He knows that this is a state that he must carry if he is to win his second term,” said Matt Strawn, Republican Party of Iowa chairman. “So make no mistake this visit has everything to do with politics and very little to do with policy.” Congress suffers from poor poll ratings, too. A CNN poll released earlier this month showed that just 14 percent of respondents approve of the way Congress is handling its job.
In Iowa Monday, Obama did what he’s done in recent days: Attempt to redirect voter angst from himself to Republicans in Congress. He has reminded Americans that the United States nearly defaulted on some of its $14.3 trillion of debt earlier this month because of political gridlock. Standard & Poor’s cited that intense bickering as a key factor in the nation’s credit rating downgrade.
Obama has a difficult argument because he’s battling something called “counterfactuals,” a term to describe what would have happened otherwise, said Jonathan Gruber, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the designers of the president’s health reform law.
Critics bash Obama about the economy, but those arguments fail to factor what would have happened if such things as stimulus spending or bank bailouts had not occurred, Gruber said. The auto industry, which is on its way back from near disaster, is a prime example, he said.
“Many people are saying the stimulus failed because the economy is in the tank,” Gruber said. “What president Obama needs to do is say basically what all mainstream economist believe, which is the economy would have been way more in the tank had he not done stimulus.” Obama appears vulnerable partly because of the nation’s 9.1 percent unemployment rate. The rate was 7.8 percent when he took office in January of 2009. Other than Ronald Reagan, no president since World War II has won re-election with unemployment above 6 percent.
Fred Abraham, head of the economics department at the University of Northern Iowa, cautioned that many factors influence both the economy and re-election campaigns.
Economic downturns take a good decade to play out, he said. The blame or the glory for the economy isn’t appropriate for any president, he said.