Obama begins political counteroffensive in Midwest

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama launches a political counteroffensive this week, weighed down by wilting support among some of his most ardent backers, a stunted economy and a daily bashing from the slew of Republicans campaigning for his job.

“We’ve still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it’s going to take time to get out of it,” the president told the U.S. over the weekend, all but pleading for people to stick with him.

A deeply unsettled political landscape, with voters in a fiercely anti-incumbent mood, is framing the 2012 presidential race 15 months before Americans decide whether to give Obama a second term or hand power to the Republicans. Trying to ride out what seems to be an unrelenting storm of economic anxiety, people in the United States increasingly are voicing disgust with most all of the men and women, Obama included, they sent to Washington to govern them.

With his approval numbers sliding, the Democratic president will try to ease their worries and sustain his resurrected fighting spirit when he sets off Monday on a bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. The trip is timed to dilute the buzz emanating from the Midwest after Republicans gathered in Iowa over the weekend for a first test of the party’s White House candidates. The state holds the nation’s first nominating test in the long road toward choosing Obama’s opponent.

“You have just sent a message that Barack Obama will be a one-term president,” Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann told elated supporters minutes after winning Saturday’s Iowa straw poll, essentially a fundraising event that also tests a candidate’s organizational and financial strength. She spent heavily and traveled throughout the state where she was born, casting herself as the evangelical Christian voice of the deeply conservative small-government, low-tax tea party wing of the party.

Bachmann pulled in 4,823 votes, or 29 percent of those cast in the straw poll, to 4,671, or 28 percent, for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the second-place finisher, and Democrats probably rejoiced that her ultraconservative voice gained strength among Republican contenders. But at the same time, the contest to challenge Obama in November 2012 grew even more jumbled. While the voting was under way in Ames, Iowa, Republicans had to shift their gaze halfway across the country to South Carolina, where Texas Gov. Rick Perry made a cleverly timed entrance into the race.

Like Bachmann and all the other candidates, he ravaged Obama. Perry said the president was presiding over an “economic disaster,” in a declaration that stole some of Bachmann’s political thunder and undercut the front-runner status of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who didn’t compete in the Iowa test vote. Perry clearly cast a broad shadow across the Republican contest.

Obama, expecting the political shelling he would take, fired pre-emptively in his weekly radio and Internet address to the nation on Saturday. He told listeners that it was the Republicans running for president and serving in Congress who were at work crushing voters’ hopes and dreams.

The question for Obama and his backers remains: Will he sustain the counterattack? Of late, he’s been seen by even his most staunch supporters as too ready to retreat from critical ground when confronted by intransigent Republicans.

Working in Obama’s favor, however, is a Republican Party still struggling to find a presidential candidate who lights a fire with voters.

But Obama’s re-election could be in peril for lack of a strong message about what he will do to lift the country out of economic malaise and political deadlock.

Polls show voters hold both parties to blame for the stunted economic recovery, an unseemly political fight over raising the limit on U.S. borrowing, an anemic deal to cut the government deficit, the subsequent and unprecedented downgrade of the country’s credit rating, wild stock market gyrations and an unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent.

In the face of that reality, Obama is tacking to put some wind in his re-election sails, apparently convinced that he can gather speed by turning up the attack on Congress.

“You’ve got a right to be frustrated,” the president said in his weekly address. “I am. Because you deserve better. I don’t think it’s too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering.”

He chastised Republicans for brinksmanship, saying “some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.”

That’s an assessment that has some validity, particularly among the new class of Republicans in the House who have used their outsized legislative power to stymie Obama at every turn since their election last November.

In Iowa, Bachmann won narrowly over the libertarian-leaning Paul.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, looking for a strong showing to boost his struggling candidacy, ended a distant third with 2,293 votes, or 14 percent. On Sunday, he quit the race.

Still, it’s important to remember that the straw poll has not been a reliable predictor of the eventual nominee and that not everyone competed in it this year.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wasn’t on the ballot and isn’t a candidate, yet. But she unexpectedly showed up at the Iowa State Fair a day before the vote, drawing huge crowds and saying she hadn’t ruled out running.

She, like Bachmann and now Perry, is a tea party favorite, but her coyness about joining the race could hurt her chances should she finally declare. The 2008 vice presidential running mate to Arizona Sen. John McCain in 2008 promptly headed out for President Ronald Reagan’s birthplace in neighboring Illinois.

Even as Obama’s bus tour has designs on blunting the Iowa Republican festivities, it will have to compete for attention as the country digests Perry’s rhetorical assault on Obama’s presidency.

Perry, a former Democrat and the nation’s longest-serving governor, told his appreciative audience that Obama’s government had “an insatiable desire to spend our children’s inheritance.” He accused Obama of presiding over an “economic disaster” that has been “downgrading our hope for a better future.”

“I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your lives as I can,” Perry said, clearly bowing to his tea party backing. Specifics for turning his promises into realities were absent.

By entering the race half way on the same day as the Iowa voting, Perry angered some Republicans, but he succeeded in diminishing attention to events in the heartland. What’s more it saved him campaign cash and energy.

If nothing else, voters won’t be able to ignore the fact that Perry’s speaking style and swagger are eerily reminiscent of another Texas governor who made the transition to the national stage, President George W. Bush. Both men were Air Force pilots.

With his solid credentials on social as well as economic issues, Perry is an immediate threat to Bachmann in Iowa and to Romney just about everywhere else.

Romney did not participate in the Iowa poll, which he won four years ago before dropping out of the race when he failed to catch fire against McCain. Romney did join all the announced candidates Thursday at an Iowa debate.

But it was his pre-debate visit to the Iowa State Fair that produced a political gift to the Democrats.

Responding to a heckler who challenged him on tax policies that benefit big business, he blurted out that “corporations are people, my friend.” The Democratic National Committee quickly used video of that remark in pre-straw poll television ads in Des Moines, the state capital. It was the kind of business-friendly, Republican applause line that could haunt him with undecided voters and disaffected Democrats.

Obama and the other Republican hopefuls now face daily scrutiny as well as they try to avoid the same kind of misstep. That’s a nearly impossible task in the long, arduous and expensive path toward the White House.