Eye on home, Obama heads for Asia-Pacific summit

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama wave as the board Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Fri­day, Nov. 11, 2011. (AP Photo/Ann Heisenfelt)

BEN FELLER

AP White House Correspondent

CORONADO, Cal­i­for­nia (AP) — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama is jet­ting away from Washington’s polit­i­cal and bud­get bat­tles, focus­ing instead on Asia-Pacific nations and try­ing to per­suade vot­ers at home that the dis­tant region is essen­tial to Amer­i­can jobs and security.

Obama departed Fri­day for sum­mits in Hawaii and Indone­sia, with a visit to Aus­tralia in between.

For nine days, the pres­i­dent will be as many as 10,000 miles (16,000 kilo­me­ters) from home at a time when jobs, the frail econ­omy and other domes­tic con­cerns mat­ter most to the U.S. elec­torate. But Asia and the Pacific region are cru­cial to America’s future, the White House insists.

Obama was born in Hawaii, spent boy­hood years in Indone­sia and points to him­self as America’s first Pacific pres­i­dent, so his world­view is shaped deeply by Asia. His admin­is­tra­tion is show­er­ing atten­tion on the region as a dri­ver of global pol­i­tics, a prized buyer of Amer­i­can prod­ucts and a cen­tral player in pro­tect­ing world peace.

“If you want Amer­ica to be a world leader in this cen­tury, that lead­er­ship is going to have to include the Asia-Pacific,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national secu­rity adviser.

Such a focus is essen­tial to Amer­i­can inter­ests, ana­lysts say, but still a test for a pres­i­dent who is seek­ing to gov­ern and run for re-election at once.

The White House hopes the world will see Obama’s trip as a pivot point in Amer­i­can pol­icy, as Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton put it. The war in Iraq will be over by year’s end, the war in Afghanistan is wind­ing down and Obama is try­ing to expand trade, secu­rity alliances and cul­tural ties with tra­di­tional allies and emerg­ing pow­ers across Asia.

The sub­text of the trip agenda is Obama’s inten­tion to keep the United States as a viable coun­ter­weight to a ris­ing China, par­tic­u­larly in the eyes of other lead­ers in the region.

The ele­ment Obama aides don’t men­tion is the poten­tial polit­i­cal cost of hav­ing the pres­i­dent out of the coun­try, half a world away, as other debates rage back home.

The econ­omy is king, from the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign to Obama’s jobs fights to a leg­isla­tive super­com­mit­tee charged with find­ing more than $1 tril­lion in cuts by a Nov. 23 dead­line. Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats seem far apart, and there is grow­ing pes­simism they will succeed.

“I can see the domes­tic polit­i­cal advis­ers say­ing, ‘Ten days in the Pacific while peo­ple are out of work in the U.S. — Mr. Pres­i­dent, you ought to cut this one short,’” said Dou­glas Paal, vice pres­i­dent for stud­ies at the Carnegie Endow­ment for Inter­na­tional Peace and a for­mer national secu­rity aide to pres­i­dents Ronald Rea­gan and George H.W. Bush.

White House offi­cials say there are no plans to do that. A sud­denly short­ened trip would be seen as a slap to Asian allies, and the Aus­tralian leg has already been post­poned twice because of higher-ranking domes­tic con­cerns for Obama.

En route to Hawaii, Obama stopped in Coro­n­ado, Cal­i­for­nia, to attend a Vet­er­ans Day bas­ket­ball game between Michi­gan State and No. 1 North Car­olina on the flight deck of the USS Carl Vin­son. That’s the air­craft car­rier that took Osama bin Laden’s body to a bur­ial at sea after Amer­i­can com­man­dos killed the al-Qaida leader in Pakistan.

Over the week­end, the pres­i­dent will host the Asia-Pacific Eco­nomic Coop­er­a­tion, or APEC, forum in Hon­olulu, to pro­mote trade and jobs.

The big push for Obama will be estab­lish­ing a Pacific-wide free trade zone that is now being nego­ti­ated by the United States and eight smaller economies.

The goal is for the trade zone to even­tu­ally cover a region account­ing for more than half of global out­put. Japan’s prime min­is­ter, Yoshi­hiko Noda, said Fri­day that his coun­try would par­tic­i­pate in talks about join­ing the free trade zone, and there are hopes that China and oth­ers will, too. The expec­ta­tions at the Obama-hosted sum­mit are not for a deal but per­haps the announce­ment of a broad frame­work and more discussions.

As usual, the more intense diplo­matic action will hap­pen on the side­lines. Obama will hold pri­vate meet­ings with the lead­ers of Japan, Rus­sia and China.

Alto­gether, Obama will spend four nights in Hawaii and is expected to have a light sched­ule on Mon­day — only a fundraiser, a reminder of the domes­tic pol­i­tics that fol­low him.

In Aus­tralia, Obama will deliver a speech to Par­lia­ment in Canberra.

He is also expected to announce a deeper U.S. mil­i­tary foot­print in the coun­try dur­ing a stop in Dar­win, in the north­ern reaches of Aus­tralia. The defense agree­ment is likely to include posi­tion­ing of U.S. equip­ment in Aus­tralia, increas­ing access to bases and con­duct­ing more joint exer­cises and training.

More broadly, Obama will use the trip to try to reas­sure allies that the United States will not slash its secu­rity pres­ence across the Asia-Pacific despite aus­ter­ity mea­sures at home.

Yet the threat of defense cuts is rat­tling Obama’s own admin­is­tra­tion. If the deficit-cutting super­com­mit­tee can­not agree on a plan that wins approval from Con­gress, a new law calls for deep cuts across the gov­ern­ment to kick in auto­mat­i­cally start­ing in 2013, includ­ing more than $500 bil­lion for the military.

The pres­i­dent caps his trip in Indone­sia, where he spent four years as a boy.

Obama deliv­ered a speech in the cap­i­tal, Jakarta, last year in which he declared that “Indone­sia is a part of me.” This time he will be the first U.S. pres­i­dent to take part in the East Asia Sum­mit, in Bali, known as a trop­i­cal par­adise for tourism. The U.S. has put its stamp on the sum­mit agenda in the area of secu­rity, includ­ing halt­ing the pro­lif­er­a­tion of nuclear weapons.

The trip amounts to Obama’s most exten­sive travel of the year.

He leaves as his approval rat­ings have been mired in the mid– to low-40 per­cent range in many recent polls, includ­ing a 46 per­cent approval num­ber in the lat­est Asso­ci­ated Press-GfK poll from mid-October. His over­all rat­ing out­paces his per­for­mance on the econ­omy. On mat­ters of for­eign affairs, Obama fares far bet­ter, gar­ner­ing the approval of about 6 in 10 adults.

Obama is expected to under­score the rel­e­vance of the trip to Amer­i­cans by the day. He will be back in Wash­ing­ton on Nov. 20.

“This isn’t a trip to the far-flung cor­ners of Asia,” said Daniel Rus­sel, Obama’s senior direc­tor for Asian affairs. “This is a trip to the Asia-Pacific. The U.S. is very much an Asia-Pacific nation. We’re a res­i­dent power.”

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