Obama rolls out bus campaign in Rust Belt states Ohio, Pa.

Obama rolls out bus campaign in Rust Belt states Ohio, Pa.

By David Jackson, USA TODAY
2012-07-04
It's back on the bus for President Obama on Thursday.
From the glass factories of Toledo, to the steel mills around Pittsburgh, Obama will lead a two-day bus tour of key areas in two states that are central to his re-election bid: northern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
"It's the Rust Belt corridor," University of Akron political scientist David Cohen said.
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The Obama campaign is billing it as a "Betting on America" bus tour in which the president will discuss "saving the auto industry, investing in manufacturing and bringing jobs back to America."
Also expect to hear more presidential criticism of Republican challenger Mitt Romney and his stewardship of the private-equity firm Bain Capital. In speeches and television ads, Obama has ripped Bain for investing in companies that either laid off workers or shut down operations completely.
New Obama ads airing in Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere link Romney to outsourcing, a major worry for decades in the heavily industrial areas the president will be visiting.
For their part, Romney and his campaign say Obama is trying to divert attention from a "jobs gap," in which the unemployment rate continues to hover above 8% even though Obama aides had projected it to be less than 6% in his first term.
Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said Obama has produced "an underperforming economy and a manufacturing sector that's hurting."
Manufacturing and jobs will be key topics for Obama as he rolls through Ohio and Pennsylvania, states with a combined 38 electoral votes; it takes 270 to win the White House.
The trip begins late this morning at the Wolcott House Museum, an early 19th-century mansion in Maumee, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo.
After that, the president's entourage will wind its way along the Ohio shores of Lake Erie, with scheduled stops that include an "ice cream social" in Sandusky and "a grass-roots event" in Parma.
The tour winds up early Friday afternoon with a speech by Obama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Also on Friday: a new monthly jobs report from the U.S. Labor Department is due. Last month, it announced a national jobless rate of 8.2%.
Ohio and Pennsylvania both have unemployment rates below 7.5% — statistics that should help Obama during his trip.
This is the first campaign bus tour for Obama, though he led similar excursions over the past year as official presidential events. In August, Obama focused on rural areas during a trip through Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.
A presidential bus tour in October stressed Obama's jobs plan in two Southern states he carried in 2008: North Carolina and Virginia.
Various polls give Obama a lead over Romney in Pennsylvania. Democratic candidates have won the state in five straight presidential elections, including Obama in 2008.
Ohio is seen as more of a tossup, and is more of the focus of Obama's latest bus ride.
The Buckeye State has gone for the winner in 12 straight presidential elections, after picking Richard Nixon over the victorious John Kennedy in 1960.
As for Romney: No Republican has ever won the White House without taking Ohio. Obama won the state by 4 points over John McCain four years ago.
Paul Beck, a political science professor at Ohio State University, said Obama's bus tour looks like a way of reinforcing his base. Although southern Ohio tends to be more Republican, northern Ohio is heavily blue collar, heavily unionized and what Beck described as "a very rich harvest of Democratic voters."
Obama "has to do pretty well there to offset other areas of the state," Beck said.