Obama attacks GOP field on bus tour

JIM KUHNHENN

Asso­ci­ated Press

DECORAH, Iowa — Hit­ting back against an embold­ened GOP, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama launched a rare direct attack Mon­day on the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial field, crit­i­ciz­ing his poten­tial 2012 rivals for their blan­ket oppo­si­tion to any deficit-cutting com­pro­mise involv­ing new taxes.

“That’s just not com­mon sense,” Obama told the crowd at a town hall-style meet­ing in Can­non Falls, Minn., as he kicked off a three-day bus tour through Min­nesota, Iowa and Illinois.

“You’ve got to be will­ing to com­pro­mise to move the coun­try for­ward,” the pres­i­dent said later in the day as he deliv­ered the same mes­sage at a town hall in Dec­o­rah, Iowa.

At the same time Obama was forced to defend his own record as Iowa vot­ers asked him about all the com­pro­mises he’s made with the GOP.

“I make no apolo­gies for being rea­son­able,” Obama declared as he stood in front of a cheery red barn, sur­rounded by bales of hay.

The pres­i­dent recalled a moment in last week’s GOP pres­i­den­tial debate when all eight of the can­di­dates said they would refuse to sup­port a deal with tax increases, even if tax rev­enues were out­weighed 10-to-1 by spend­ing cuts.

Obama didn’t men­tion any of the can­di­dates by name, and pref­aced the remark by say­ing, “I know it’s not elec­tion sea­son yet.”

But his com­ment under­scored that elec­tion sea­son is indeed under way. The bus tour, although an offi­cial White House event rather than a cam­paign swing, is tak­ing Obama through three states he won in 2008 but where he now needs to shore up his stand­ing. It’s giv­ing him a chance to return to the grass­roots cam­paign­ing that helped pro­pel him to the White House, and shed his jacket and tie to mix it up with vot­ers in cof­fee shops and lunch joints far from the Belt­way — as he did in three unsched­uled stops Mon­day, includ­ing one in a tree-lined Min­nesota town where he was swarmed by enthu­si­as­tic kids.

The pres­i­dent is trav­el­ing in an impos­ing new $1.1 mil­lion bus, out­fit­ted with tinted win­dows and flash­ing lights, that the Secret Ser­vice purchased.

In Iowa, Obama returned to a state that handed him a key vic­tory over Demo­c­ra­tic rival Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton in their nom­i­na­tion fight but where Repub­li­cans have now been blan­ket­ing the state in prepa­ra­tion for its first-in-the-nation cau­cuses, attack­ing the pres­i­dent at every turn. The bus tour came on the heels of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s week­end vic­tory in the Iowa Straw Poll and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s contest-rattling entrance into the race.

It also came after the pres­i­dent spent much of the sum­mer holed up in the nation’s cap­i­tal enmeshed in bit­ter, par­ti­san nego­ti­a­tions on the debt cri­sis that cratered his approval rat­ings and those of Con­gress amid a fal­ter­ing econ­omy and high unemployment.

The pres­i­dent got a rosy recep­tion from his Min­nesota audi­ence, but Iowa vot­ers were a tougher crowd, demand­ing to know why he’d com­pro­mised on prin­ci­ples impor­tant to Democ­rats, and ask­ing to hear his plans for deal­ing with intran­si­gent Republicans.

The pres­i­dent responded by pledg­ing to present a spe­cific jobs plan to Con­gress when law­mak­ers return from their sum­mer recess in Sep­tem­ber. “And if they don’t get it done, then we’ll be run­ning against a Con­gress that’s not doing any­thing for the Amer­i­can peo­ple and the choice will be very stark and very clear,” the pres­i­dent said.

At both town hall meet­ings, Obama used ques­tions on his health care bill to take hard shots at Mitt Rom­ney, the GOP front-runner who has had to defend imple­ment­ing a health care plan while gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts that’s sim­i­lar to the fed­eral version.

“You’ve got a gov­er­nor who’s run­ning for pres­i­dent right now who insti­tuted the exact same thing in Mass­a­chu­setts,” Obama said, refer­ring to a cen­tral com­po­nent of his law — the require­ment for nearly every­one to carry health insurance.

“This used to be a Repub­li­can idea,” Obama said. “It’s like sud­denly they got amnesia.”

The so-called indi­vid­ual man­date in Obama’s health care law was struck down by a fed­eral appeals court last week, but Obama expressed con­fi­dence that the Supreme Court ulti­mately would uphold it if jus­tices fol­low exist­ing law and precedent.

One woman told Obama she was recov­er­ing from lung can­cer and had slept in her truck for two days to ask him a ques­tion about Social Secu­rity, although the pres­i­dent missed the chance to sym­pa­thize with her about her health when he responded with a defense of Social Security.

The woman, Lois Dare, 53, expressed dis­ap­point­ment later that Obama didn’t acknowl­edge her situation.

“I need help,” she said. “I was hop­ing he would have said, ‘Let me take some infor­ma­tion down and go back to the White House.’”

Obama began his remarks at the town halls with what’s becom­ing a refrain: crit­i­ciz­ing Con­gress, accus­ing law­mak­ers of putting pol­i­tics ahead of the coun­try and call­ing on vot­ers to tell them to cut it out.

“You’ve got to send a mes­sage to Wash­ing­ton that it’s time for the games to stop,” Obama said.

Appear­ing in Can­non Falls, Minn., ahead of Obama’s town hall, Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee Chair­man Reince Priebus ral­lied a few dozen tea party mem­bers and Col­lege Republicans.

“We won’t stand idly by while he uses our hard-earned tax dol­lars to spin his fail­ure to put Amer­ica back to work,” Priebus said.

Between his events in Can­non Falls, Minn, and Dec­o­rah, Iowa, Obama logged miles of heart­land high­way in his bus, mak­ing sev­eral unan­nounced stops. First, it was lunch at the Old Mar­ket Deli in Can­non Falls with five Min­nesota mil­i­tary vet­er­ans who served after the Sept. 11, 2001, ter­ror attacks. Then it was cof­fee at the Cof­fee Mill in Zum­brota, Minn., where one patron, Wayne Gadi­ent from Good­hue, Minn., had some encour­ag­ing words for the pres­i­dent: “I think he’s doing the best he can do with what he has to work with.”

And finally the pres­i­dent stopped stop in Chat­field, Minn., pulling up before a col­or­ful array of chil­dren from the Val­ley­land sum­mer camp who stood on the side­walk in the tree lined town. They held home­made signs: “we (heart) Obama” and “Honk if you’re the president.”

On Tues­day the pres­i­dent holds what the White House is billing as a “rural eco­nomic forum” in Peosta, Iowa, near the Illi­nois bor­der, where he’ll be joined by Agri­cul­ture Sec­re­tary Tom Vil­sack, a for­mer Iowa gov­er­nor, to announce sev­eral ini­tia­tives for rural areas. He’ll wrap up Wednes­day with town halls in Atkin­son in north­west­ern Illi­nois, and then in nearby Alpha, Ill., before return­ing to Washington.

On Thurs­day he flies with his fam­ily to Martha’s Vine­yard in Mass­a­chu­setts for his annual sum­mer vacation.

Posted by AP News on Aug 15 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.