Obama's Ohio: Main Street, mean streets

by Mark Silva and updated with speech

Ohio may serve as President Barack Obama's "Main Street'' today, as he meets with workers, touts alternative energy as a job-creating engine and holds a town-hall styled session in Lorain County, but these could be mean streets for his party in 2010.

In a bid to stoke the president's own sagging popularity, renew the White House's agenda for economic revival and energize his party as well, Obama has gone to Ohio, both a bellwether and a battleground.

"I know these have been difficult and unsettling times for people in Elyria, in Ohio, and across our country,'' Obama plans to say today. "I walked into office a year ago in the middle of a raging economic storm that was wreaking devastation on your town and communities everywhere...

"Today, because of the actions we took, the worst of this economic storm has passed,'' Obama will say, according to remarks released by the White House. "But families like yours and communities like Elyria are still reeling from the devastation left in its wake.''

This is an important pitch for the president. In 2008, the president only narrowly carried this state, which has voted for every winner of the White House since 1960. Ohio was George W. Bush's state in 2004, by an even narrower margin than Obama's.

And now, Ohio has both an open U.S. Senate seat - with the announced retirement of Republican Sen. George Voinovich this year - and a fight for the governor's mansion this fall, with a popular former Republican congressman, John Kasich, lining up for a chance to challenge Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, trailing in the polls.

The day after the president's planned nationally televised State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, both the president and Vice President Joe Biden plan to visit another hard-fought state, Florida. Obama and Biden will travel to the Tampa Bay area.

Obama only narrowly carried Florida in 2008. Democrats are attempting to take the governor's office in November from the Republicans, with Republican Gov. Charlie Crist facing a fight within his own party for nomination for an open GOP-held Senate seat. Unemployment has reached 11.8 percent in Florida.

Today, it was Ohio. The president brought Ohio's Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown with him aboard Air Force One for the trip to Cleveland and a town hall-styled meeting at Lorain County Community College in Elyria.

The president has been touting his economic stimulus act as a job-saving measure responsible for creating or saving 1.5 million jobs during a recession which has shed many millions more. With a national rate of employment at 10 percent, Ohio's rose to 10.9 percent in December, it was announced today as the president traveled to the state.

Obama was meeting with area employers and taking a tour of the Wind Turbine Manufacturing and Fab Lab facilities at the community college - emblematic of his pitch that investment in "green'' energy production will provide an economic engine as well - before his town-hall session.

The White House, which had planned this trip to Lorain County well before the president's party lost its super-majority in the Senate in a surprise special election loss in Massachusetts this week, has billed this as another stop on Obama's "White House to Main Street Tour.''

In Washington, House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who has long hammered Obama with a repeating refrain of "Where are the Jobs?''' said today that the president has failed to deliver on a promise of jobs that he has made before in the Buckeye State.

"When he last visited Elyria, candidate Obama promised that as president he would enact a 'job creation agenda.''' Boehner said today.

"Yet for the past year, Ohioans have watched anxiously as Washington Democrats', with the approval of President Obama, have pushed a job-killing agenda that includes a 'stimulus' that isn't working, a government takeover of health care that will raise taxes... a 'cap and trade' national energy tax (and other measures) that will devastate Ohio's economy and kill jobs at a time we can least afford it.''

(President Barack Obama is pictured above with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) landing in Cleveland today for a tour and town-hall styled meeting in Lorain County. Photo by David Richard / AP. See the rest of the story and the president's prepared remarks below:)

Noting the newest report of unemployment in Ohio today, the Republican House leader said: "A jobless recovery is a far cry from what Ohio's hard-working families were promised.''

The president was also welcomed to Cleveland today with an Op-ed signed by Boehner in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

"Just three days have passed since voters in Massachusetts, one of the bluest of blue states, delivered the president a clear, stinging indictment of his big-government agenda by electing Republican Scott Brown to fill the U.S. Senate seat held for 47 years by the late Ted Kennedy,'' Boehner wrote. "Many Democrats lost in the upside-down world that is Washington are still wondering, how could this be?

"Tuesday's results should come as no surprise, however,'' he wrote. "For more than nine months, a political rebellion has been brewing as Americans have watched with angst as Washington Democrats have pushed job-killing policies that have only made a bad jobs situation even worse. Nowhere is this more evident than in the state of Ohio.''

Voinovich was striking a more constructive note today, saying that he has called on the president to support an infrastructure-rebuilding bill as a key to job creation.

"When the federal government spends money, it is our responsibility to ensure we are getting the biggest job-growth bang for our tax dollars,'' Voinovich said today. "States have identified 9,500 infrastructure projects valued at more than 69.5 billion that are ready to go. A transportation reauthorization bill would put people to work and create lasting infrastructure projects around the country.''

Voinovich, who met with Obama at the White House this week, said today that he has also asked the president to "provide his leadership as momentum builds towards the creation of a debt reduction commission with teeth.'' The White House said this week that it is open to the idea of the creation of such a commission.

In Ohio today, the president is placing a spotlight on one of the states that will be most heavily contested as Republicans fight for a growing share of the Senate and House.

Obama carried Ohio with 51.2 perceet of the vote n 2008 to Republican Sen. John McCain's 47.2 percent, with Obama leading McCain by 2.7 to 2.5 million votes. Bush had carried Ohio by about 120,000 votes over Sen. John Kerry in 2004.

Yet Obama's own standing has slipped in Ohio, as it has nationally.

In April, The Ohio Poll conducted by the University of Cincinnati found that 63 percent of Ohioans approved of the job that Obama was performing as president. At the end of October, the latest Ohio Poll on this question measured his job approval at 52 percent.

Gov. Strickland's overall approval stood below 50 percent in the Ohio Poll.

And Ohioans continued to see economic conditions in Ohio and the U.S. as either "fair" or "poor'' in the Oct. 14-30 survey.

Additionally, more Ohioans said they disapprove (53 percent) than approve (45 percent) of Obama's handling of the economy.

Here, from the White House, are the president's prepared remarks for his appearance at Lorain County Community College today:

"It's great to be here in Elyria. It's always nice to get out of Washington. For two years, I had the privilege of traveling across this country, talking with folks like you about the challenges you face in your own lives, and the challenges we all face together as a nation.

In fact, the hardest part of being president, as great an honor as it is, is not being able to do that as much anymore. The White House is a wonderful place to work. You live above the store. I can see my kids when they wake up every morning and eat dinner with them every night, and that makes everything else so much better. But the truth is, being President is also a little confining. I can't just walk around and visit people like I used to. I can't just go to the barber shop or sit at a diner.

So, I appreciate the chance to come out here and spend a day - to visit plants like EMC Precision Machining and the clean energy job training program here at Lorain County Community College. I appreciate the chance to spend a day with all of you.

I know these have been difficult and unsettling times for people in Elyria, in Ohio, and across our country. I walked into office a year ago in the middle of a raging economic storm that was wreaking devastation on your town and communities everywhere. We had to take some difficult steps to deal with that mess, to stave off an even greater economic catastrophe. We had to stabilize the big banks, which, given their role in creating this mess, was a tough pill to swallow.

I knew it would be unpopular - and rightly so. But I also knew that we had to do it because if they went down, your local banks would have gone down, too. If the financial system had gone down, it would have taken the entire economy and millions more families and businesses with it. We would have been looking at a Second Great Depression.

In my first months in office, we also helped save two of the big three automakers from collapse. Some people weren't happy about that, either. They felt that if you make a bad decision, you ought to reap the consequences, just like any business would. But if we had let GM and Chrysler simply go under, hundreds of thousands of Americans would have been hurt, not just at those companies themselves, but at other auto companies and at their suppliers and dealers, here in Ohio, up in Michigan, and all across this country.

So, we said, if you're willing to take the tough and painful steps to make yourselves more competitive, we're willing to invest in your future. And earlier this week, we heard that the auto industry planned to make almost 3 million cars and trucks here in North America in the next three months - up 69% from the first three months of 2009.

We also passed a Recovery Act to pull our economy back from the brink. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working Americans - 15 different tax cuts for working families and 7 different tax cuts for small businesses so they can start up, and grow, and hire. We extended and increased unemployment insurance. We made COBRA cheaper. We gave aid to states to help them through these tough times. We made the largest investment in infrastructure since the creation of the Interstate Highway System, putting Americans to work rebuilding our roads, bridges and waterways, doing the work America needs done.

Today, because of the actions we took, the worst of this economic storm has passed. But families like yours and communities like Elyria are still reeling from the devastation left in its wake. Folks have seen jobs you thought would last forever disappear. You've seen plants close and businesses shut down. I've heard about how the city government here is bare bones. And how you can't get to work or go buy groceries like you used to because of cuts in the county transit system.

And this, after one of the toughest decades our middle class has faced in generations. This has been a decade where some Americans made huge amounts of money, while many others pedaled faster and faster, only to find themselves stuck in the same place, or even slipping behind. Even as you've found your paychecks shrinking, even as you've found the value of your biggest asset - your home - falling, the cost of everything has gone up. The cost of groceries. The cost of sending your kids to college. The cost of saving for retirement. And another pressure you've faced is the breakneck, unrelenting climb of costs for the health care you need.

I didn't run for President to turn away from these challenges. I didn't run for President to kick them down the road. I ran for President to confront them - once and for all. I ran for this office to rebuild our economy so it works not just for a fortunate few, but for hardworking people in this country. To create good jobs that can support a family. To get wages growing and incomes rising. To improve the quality of America's schools and lift up great community colleges like this, which are so important to our future. To make that higher education affordable for the children of working families. And, yes, to deal with the problem of runaway health insurance costs that are breaking family budgets, breaking business budgets, and breaking our national budget.

No, I had no illusions when I took on health care. It was always going to be hard. I knew from the beginning that seven Presidents had tried it and seven Presidents had failed. But I also knew that insurance premiums had more than doubled in the past decade, that out-of-pocket expenses had skyrocketed, that millions more people had lost their insurance, and that it would only get worse.

I took this up because I want to ease the burdens on all the families and small businesses that can't afford to pay outrageous rates. I want to protect mothers, fathers, children from being targeted by the worst practices of the insurance industry.

Now, we've gotten pretty far down the road, but I have to admit, we've run into a bit of a buzz saw along the way. The long process of getting things done runs headlong into the special interests, their armies of lobbyists, and partisan politics aimed at exploiting fears instead of getting things done. And the longer it's taken, the uglier the process has looked.

I know folks in Washington are in a little bit of a frenzy this week, trying to figure out what the election in Massachusetts the other day means for health insurance reform, for Republicans and Democrats, and for me. This is what they love to do.

But this isn't about me. It's about you. I didn't take up this issue to boost my poll numbers or score political points - believe me, if I were, I would have picked something a lot easier than this. No, I'm trying to solve the problems that folks here in Elyria and across this country face every day. And I am not going to walk away just because it's hard. We're going to keep on working to get this done with Democrats, Republicans - anyone who is willing to step up. Because I am not going to watch more people get crushed by costs, or denied the care they need by insurance company bureaucrats, or partisan politics, or special interest power in Washington.

Let me tell you - so long as I have the privilege of serving as your President, I'll never stop fighting for you. I'll take my lumps, too. I'll never stop fighting to bring jobs back to Elyria. I'll never stop fighting for an economy where hard work is rewarded, where responsibility is honored, where accountability is upheld, where we're creating the jobs of tomorrow.

That's why I'm calling on Congress to pass a jobs bill to put more Americans to work rebuilding roads and railways, to provide tax breaks to small businesses for hiring people, and to offer families an incentive to make their homes energy efficient, saving them money while creating jobs.

And that's why we enacted incentives that are beginning to give rise to a clean energy economy, that are starting to translate into real jobs making solar panels, making windmill blades, making cutting-edge batteries. In fact, almost $25 million of our investment went to a plant right here in Elyria that's helping produce the car batteries of the future.

So long as I'm President, I'll never stop fighting for policies that will help restore home values, to redeem the investment that folks have made. I'll never stop fighting to give our kids the best education possible; to take the tens of billions of dollars we pay banks to act as middlemen on student loans and invest that money in the students who need it.

I'll never stop fighting to give every American a fair shake. That's why the very first bill I signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Act to uphold the principle of equal pay for equal work for men and women alike. Especially in this age when so many families need two paychecks to get by.

So long as I'm President, I'll never stop fighting to protect you from the kind of deceptive practices we've seen from some in the financial sector. That's why I signed a Credit Card Bill of Rights into law to protect you from surprise charges, retroactive rate hikes, and other unfair rules. And that's why I'm fighting for a tough Consumer Financial Protection Agency to protect you against those hidden overdraft fees that can make a single ATM withdrawal cost thirty dollars or more.

I'll never stop fighting to open up government. That's why we put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest transparency rules of any administration in history.

So long as I'm President, I'll never stop fighting to cut waste and abuse in Washington; to eliminate what we don't need - to pay for what we do; to rein in exploding deficits we've been accumulating for too long.

And I'm going to keep up the fight for real, meaningful health insurance reforms. That's why we expanded the children's health insurance program to include four million more kids. And that's why I'll continue fighting for reform that will hold the insurance industry accountable and bring more stability and security to folks in our health care system.

These are some of the fights we've had. And I can promise you, there will be more fights in the days ahead. We're having one of them right now - because I want to charge Wall Street a modest fee to repay taxpayers in full for saving their skin in a time of need. You can rest assured, we're going to get that money - your money - back, each and every dime.

You know, I said at the beginning how much it means to me to travel this country; how much it means to me to be here in Elyria. That is more true now than ever before. Because it's easy to get a pretty warped view of things from Washington. But when I get out here and talk with folks like you, I'm reminded of the strength - the resilience and perseverance - of the American people. I'm reminded of the fundamental character of the Americans I am so privileged to serve. It's that character that has borne our nation through seas far rougher than the ones we face today. And it is that character that will carry us through this storm to better days ahead.

Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.''