Obama to aim Iowa remarks at undecideds

9 July, 2012

by Jennifer Jacobs

President Barack Obama will aim straight at undecided voters when he drills down on his ideas for the middle class and paying down the federal deficit at a campaign rally in Iowa this week.

The president wants to spell out for Iowans his belief that he and Mitt Romney offer two fundamentally different visions for sustained growth — and his would build an economy “from the middle out, not from the top down,” Obama aides said Sunday.

During his event Tuesday in Cedar Rapids, Obama will again talk about choices, said Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager.

“We have a choice to build an economy meant to last that restores the security the middle class lost over the previous decade, or we can return to the same policies from that decade that crashed our economy and crippled the middle class,” Cutter told The Des Moines Register in a telephone interview Sunday.

“That’s the choice in this election, and that’s the critical difference between President Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s visions of where to take this country.”

Shawn McCoy, Romney’s Iowa campaign spokesman, also framed the election as an important choice for Iowans. McCoy said Obama’s campaign promises are hard to take seriously because he broke his promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.

“His reckless spending has buried our grandchildren in debt while middle-class families struggle with falling incomes and high unemployment,” McCoy said. “Fortunately, Iowans have a choice. Mitt Romney has the experience and proven track record to create jobs and get our economy moving.”

Tuesday’s visit will be Obama’s fourth this year to Iowa, a state that both sides are battling hard to win on Nov. 6.

The president will meet privately with an Iowa couple, Ali and Jason McLaughlin, to highlight how the federal government can support middle-class families who are the backbone of the economy, campaign aides said.

In the early afternoon, he will give a public speech at the basketball arena at Kirkwood Community College. No more tickets are left for the rally “due to overwhelming demand,” campaign aides said Sunday, but they declined to say how many tickets were available. Kirkwood security officials referred questions about crowd capacity to Obama officials, but news reports indicate the facility seats around 3,000. Doors open at 10:15 a.m. for those with tickets.

Politics watchers have noted that a small number of voters could decide this race: The Republican base will support its guy, the Democratic base will go for its guy, so the outcome will rest on undecided voters, most of whom are affiliated with no party.

The pool of persuadable voters is about 3.75 million in 11 battleground states combined — Iowa, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — based on the 2008 presidential vote multiplied by the percentage of undecideds represented by the RealClearPolitics.com average in each state.

In Iowa, it’s about 142,500 people who could be persuaded to turn either direction.

Obama’s Iowa speech will echo remarks he made in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 14, campaign aides said. That speech was a direct appeal to those who don’t know where their loyalties lie as November approaches, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote that day.

“Obama repeatedly used the phrase ‘this is not spin’ when laying out the parameters of the economic vision offered by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney,” Cillizza wrote. “He linked Romney to House Republicans, who are decidedly unpopular among independents. He used the word ‘fair’ over and over again. He condemned the ‘stalemate’ in Washington and the power that money plays in politics. (Both are a sort of catnip for independent voters.)”

Obama has repeatedly said his vision centers on “education, energy, innovation, infrastructure and a tax code focused on American job creation and balanced deficit reduction.”

“This is the vision behind the jobs plan I sent Congress back in September — a bill filled with bipartisan ideas that, according to independent economists, would create up to 1 million additional jobs if passed today,” Obama said in Ohio.

Iowa has been a swing state for two of the past three elections, where a tight race has come down to fewer than 10,000 votes. Obama did well last time with middle-ground voters such as independents and moderate Republicans, but this year, he’s struggling to keep from going under water here. Polling shows he’s running neck and neck with Romney.

In 12 battleground states including Iowa, Obama is at 47 percent and Romney is at 45 percent, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll released Sunday. The survey of 1,200 registered voters was taken June 22-29.

Some political strategists think the race for Electoral College votes could end up 266-266, with Iowa as the decider. The battle could come down to Iowa’s six votes if Romney wins traditionally Republican states plus Florida, Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina, and Obama claims traditionally Democratic states plus Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, said Sunday that Obama in his Iowa speech would stress how to pay down the deficit “so that we can invest in the things that we need to grow, like education and clean energy.”

“The president has a balanced plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion by asking everybody to pay their fair share and cutting waste,” she said. “That’s a fundamental difference with Mitt Romney, who has a $5 trillion tax cut geared toward the very wealthiest that he pays for by either raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a bigger hole in the deficit.”

— Jennifer Jacobs