Obama applauds Iowa Democrats for their help

KEN THOMAS, LUKE MEREDITH

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Insert­ing his voice into a big night for Repub­li­cans, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama appealed to Iowa Democ­rats on Tues­day dur­ing the first bal­lot­ing in the GOP pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, seek­ing to counter months of with­er­ing crit­i­cism in the state that launched his pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions four years ago.

Obama told party activists in a live video tele­con­fer­ence that because of their sup­port, the Iraq war ended, a major health care reform bill was signed into law and the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” pol­icy on gays ended.

“Because of you, because of all the mem­o­ries I have of being in your liv­ing rooms, meet­ing you in a diner or see­ing you over in a cam­paign office, I have never lost that same source of inspi­ra­tion that drove me to embark on this jour­ney in the first place,” Obama told Democ­rats attend­ing precinct caucuses.

Obama out­lined his progress dur­ing the first term and asked party activists for their help as Repub­li­cans made their first step toward choos­ing a chal­lenger among a field that included Mitt Rom­ney, Rick San­to­rum, Ron Paul and oth­ers. Beyond its early vot­ing sta­tus, Iowa was expected to be hotly con­tested in the fall election.

“We’re bat­tling mil­lions of dol­lars of neg­a­tive adver­tis­ing and lob­by­ists and spe­cial inter­ests who don’t want to see the change that you worked so hard for to fully take root,” Obama said. “And that’s why time this time out is going to be, in some ways, more impor­tant than the first time out.”

“The prob­lems that we’ve been deal­ing with over the last three years, they didn’t hap­pen overnight and we’re not going to fix them overnight,” he said. “We’ve been mak­ing steady progress.”

Obama wasted lit­tle time get­ting back in front of vot­ers fol­low­ing a Hawai­ian vaca­tion spent largely out of the spot­light. On Wednes­day, Obama will travel to Cleve­land for an event focused on the economy.

The pres­i­dent used the video tele­con­fer­ence to talk directly with vot­ers, an approach that encoun­tered some audio prob­lems dur­ing the short speech and question-and-answer session.

Obama was seek­ing to counter months of pound­ing by Repub­li­cans in Iowa and by the Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee, which has assailed Obama’s eco­nomic record and tagged him as a pres­i­dent who has failed to live up to lofty expectations.

“Three years later, the president’s promises of hope and change have been replaced with a record of failed lead­er­ship and poli­cies that have made the econ­omy worse,” RNC spokes­woman Kirsten Kukowski said.

Iowa looks to be among about a dozen states that could shift either way in the 2012 cam­paign. Iowa has switched its sup­port in each of the past three elec­tions, sup­port­ing Obama in 2008, Repub­li­can Pres­i­dent George W. Bush in 2004 and Demo­c­rat Al Gore in 2000.

In Des Moines, roughly 200 peo­ple gath­ered at a cau­cus site at Lin­coln High School, mak­ing small talk and wait­ing for Obama to speak as a girls’ bas­ket­ball game was played in an adjoin­ing gym. Sev­eral party loy­al­ists said they thought Obama could reignite the loyal sup­port he gen­er­ated in 2008.

“No Repub­li­can can­di­date is excit­ing their base. There’s just isn’t any­body excit­ing their base, and if they can’t get excited, I just can’t believe they have a chance what­so­ever,” said Danny Water­man, 65, a retired police offi­cer who sup­ported Obama four years ago.

Rebecca Kaiser, 60, an insur­ance clerk who served as a precinct chair­woman for Obama’s cam­paign in 2008, said the president’s “hands have really been tied.”

“With­out the sup­port of Con­gress he can’t get any­thing done, and now it seems as though he’s learn­ing to put a lit­tle more pres­sure on them,” Kaiser said. “I would have liked to have seen that ear­lier on, but hind­sight is 20/20.”

Try­ing to build on his 2008 win there, Obama’s cam­paign has opened eight offices in the state and had held more than 1,200 train­ing ses­sions, phone banks and other events and made more than 350,000 phone calls to sup­port­ers since April.

The president’s re-election cam­paign emailed sup­port­ers a video of Obama’s Iowa vic­tory speech in Jan­u­ary 2008, argu­ing he has kept the promises he made that night: mak­ing health care more afford­able, cut­ting taxes for the mid­dle class, end­ing the war in Iraq and reduc­ing the nation’s depen­dence on for­eign oil.

Look­ing ahead, Obama faces more debate on extend­ing pay­roll tax cuts, the same issue that con­sumed Wash­ing­ton dur­ing the final days of December.

Con­gress broke through a stale­mate just days before Christ­mas, agree­ing to extend the cuts for two months. Law­mak­ers will get back to work later this month to nego­ti­ate a full-year exten­sion of the cuts, which Obama supports.

White House offi­cials say the tax cut exten­sion is the last “must-do” leg­isla­tive item on Obama’s agenda this year. His strat­egy for his fourth year in office will focus largely on tak­ing exec­u­tive actions that do not need approval from law­mak­ers as he seeks to break away from a deeply unpop­u­lar Congress.

Posted by AP News on Jan 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.