Obama boosted by upbeat housing reports, new polls

DAVID ESPO

AP Spe­cial Correspondent

WASHINGTON — Fresh signs of a national hous­ing rebound and grow­ing sup­port in pub­lic opin­ion polls boosted Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s bid for a new term in the White House on Wednes­day as Repub­li­can rival Mitt Rom­ney strug­gled to quell his video controversy.

The challenger’s attempts to get his cam­paign back on track ran into new dif­fi­culty in the form of crit­i­cism from rank-and-file Repub­li­cans con­cerned about their own elec­tion prospects in the fall.

“I have a very dif­fer­ent view of the world,” said appointed Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, tak­ing issue with Romney’s dis­mis­sive com­ments about the 47 per­cent of all Amer­i­cans who pay no income taxes. Sep­a­rately, Sen­ate GOP lead­ers avoided answer­ing ques­tions about their pres­i­den­tial can­di­date at a news con­fer­ence in the Capitol.

After days of vir­tu­ally non-stop polit­i­cal dam­age con­trol on issues for­eign and domes­tic, Rom­ney told an audi­ence at an Atlanta fundraiser: “The ques­tion of this cam­paign is not who cares about the poor and the mid­dle class. I do. He (Obama) does. The ques­tion is who can help the poor and the mid­dle class. I can. He can’t.”

The for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor spoke about 48 hours after a video emerged that showed him telling donors last May that as a can­di­date for the White House, “my job is not to worry about” the mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who don’t earn enough to pay income taxes.

Obama spent the day in the White House, a rar­ity in a race with less than seven weeks yet to run. He invited democ­racy advo­cate Aung San Suu Kyi of Myan­mar to the Oval Office, a chat between two Nobel Peace Prize winners.

Rom­ney raised cam­paign cash in Geor­gia in advance of an evening appear­ance in bat­tle­ground Florida, his first before a pub­lic audi­ence since the emer­gence of the video­tape. Under pres­sure from fel­low Repub­li­cans to cam­paign more exten­sively, he was con­sid­er­ing adding at least one appear­ance to a light week­end sched­ule, offi­cials said.

In a cam­paign dom­i­nated all year by the slug­gish econ­omy, the gov­ern­ment said con­struc­tion of single-family homes jumped to the high­est rate in more than two years. Sep­a­rately, the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Real­tors reported that home sales rose last month to the high­est level since May 2010.

Real estate has been among the slow­est sec­tors of the econ­omy to recover from the national down­turn of 2008. The admin­is­tra­tion has strug­gled to reverse a decline in home val­ues that left mil­lions who man­aged to avoid fore­clo­sure owing more on their mort­gages than their homes are worth.

There was down­beat news, as well, in an econ­omy strug­gling to cre­ate jobs. State offi­cials in Michi­gan reported the state’s sea­son­ally adjusted unem­ploy­ment rate in August rose by four-tenths of a per­cent to 9.4 per­cent, well above the national aver­age of 8.1 per­cent. Rom­ney grew up in Michi­gan, but he has yet to con­test it seri­ously in his quest for the White House.

A new AP-GfK poll — taken before the Rom­ney video was revealed — put Obama’s over­all approval rat­ing among voting-age adults at 56 per­cent. That was above 50 per­cent for the first time since May, and at its high­est level since the death of ter­ror­ist leader Osama bin Laden more than a year ago.

Among likely vot­ers, how­ever, the race was a sta­tis­ti­cal tie, with Obama at 47 per­cent and Rom­ney at 46 percent.

The two were also tied sta­tis­ti­cally when it came to han­dling the econ­omy and the fed­eral deficit, while the pres­i­dent was pre­ferred on issues of pro­tect­ing the coun­try, han­dling health care and under­stand­ing the prob­lems of “peo­ple like you.” On a ques­tion of per­sonal cred­i­bil­ity, 50 per­cent of likely vot­ers said Obama more often says what he really believes, while 42 per­cent said that applied to Romney.

At the same time, 61 per­cent of likely vot­ers described the econ­omy as poor, and only 22 per­cent described it as good more than 3 ½ years after Obama took office, another indi­ca­tion of the chal­lenges he faces as he bids for a new term in a time of long-term unem­ploy­ment over 8 per­cent nationally.

Other new sur­veys sug­gested grow­ing sup­port for Obama in the wake of back-to-back national polit­i­cal con­ven­tions and Romney’s strug­gle last week to explain an erro­neous state­ment issued at a time of demon­stra­tions — one of them deadly — at U.S. diplo­matic posts in the Mid­dle East.

An NBC News/Wall Street Jour­nal poll taken Sept. 12–16 put the president’s lead among likely vot­ers at 50–44 per­cent nationwide.

State sur­veys by Quin­nip­iac Uni­ver­sity, The New York Times and CBS News showed Obama at over 50 per­cent sup­port among likely vot­ers in Vir­ginia, with 13 elec­toral votes, and Wis­con­sin, with 10. Obama car­ried Wis­con­sin hand­ily four years ago, but Rom­ney recently sig­naled he was hop­ing to make it competitive.

The two men were in a sta­tis­ti­cal tie in Col­orado, which has 9 elec­toral votes, in sur­veys con­ducted between Sept. 11 and 17.

A Wash­ing­ton Post poll also showed Obama with a lead in Virginia.

All the sur­veys were taken before the flap erupted over Romney’s “47 per­cent” remarks.

Taken together, they showed a highly com­pet­i­tive race as Obama and Rom­ney pur­sue the 270 elec­toral votes needed for vic­tory, although with the pres­i­dent in a stronger posi­tion than before the two polit­i­cal con­ven­tions and with the econ­omy still the dom­i­nant issue.

“This is our elec­tion to lose,” main­tained Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham, R-S.C. “There’s a rea­son no pres­i­dent has ever been elected with eco­nomic num­bers like this. If Obama wins, he’ll be rewrit­ing polit­i­cal history.”

For now, Rom­ney is work­ing to reframe the video con­tro­versy into a philo­soph­i­cal dif­fer­ence between him­self and Obama — to his own advantage.

“Instead of cre­at­ing a web of depen­dency, I will pur­sue poli­cies that grow our econ­omy and lift Amer­i­cans out of poverty,” he wrote in an arti­cle in USA Today that omit­ted any ref­er­ence to the furor.

At his fundraiser in Atlanta, how­ever, he referred for a sec­ond day in a row to a video of Obama, made in 1998. An Illi­nois state sen­a­tor at the time, Obama said he believed in income redis­tri­b­u­tion, “at least to a cer­tain level to make sure everybody’s got a shot.”

Rom­ney added that the coun­try “does not work by a gov­ern­ment say­ing, become depen­dent on gov­ern­ment, become depen­dent upon redis­tri­b­u­tion. That will kill the Amer­i­can entre­pre­neur­ship that’s lifted our econ­omy over the years.”

Respond­ing for the pres­i­dent, White House spokesman Jay Car­ney said Romney’s efforts to push the 14-year-old video were the work of a can­di­date hav­ing “a very bad day or a very bad week.”

Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid took up the cause in highly per­sonal terms.

“So who are those Amer­i­cans Mitt Rom­ney dis­dains as ‘vic­tims’ and ‘those peo­ple?’” the Nevada Demo­c­rat said in a speech on the Sen­ate floor. “They’re not avoid­ing their tax bills, using Cay­man Island tax shel­ters or Swiss bank accounts like Mitt Romney.”

Romney’s cam­paign released two tele­vi­sion ads accus­ing the Obama admin­is­tra­tion of con­duct­ing a “war on coal.” Aides said they were trig­gered by an announce­ment on Tues­day by Alpha Nat­ural Resources that it will close mines in Vir­ginia, West Vir­ginia and Penn­syl­va­nia and elim­i­nate 1,200 jobs.

Posted by AP News on Sep 19 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.