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CommentCLEVELAND— President Obama made his closing argument ahead of Tuesday’s mid-term elections today, warning voters that allowing Republicans to regain control of Congress would lead to Washington pushing policies that would be catastrophic for the nation’s economy.
It’s not surprising that Obama chose the bellwether of Ohio to be the site of his last public campaign event ahead of the election. It was one of nine states that he was able to move into the Democratic column in the 2008 presidential election, and the state could play a crucial role in his own reelection fortunes.
The president was not bashful about plumping his efforts in Ohio, where the administration has poured $8.5 billion in stimulus money.
“Joe Biden and I have been travelling across the country,” Obama told the 8,000 supporters who attended the rally on the Cleveland State University campus. “There's a lot of places that we're doing a lot of great work, but there are very few places we're doing as much good work as we're doing right here in Ohio.”
With today’s rally, Obama concluded a three-day, five-state campaign push that was intended as a personal pitch from the president to voters to defy pollsters projections that Democrats will lose the House and, perhaps, the Senate.
The Cleveland event also marked his 12th visit to Ohio since he took office, and his second campaign trip to the state this month. Democrats are counting on Obama’s visit to help rally disenchanted Democrats and angry independents to go the polls to vote for Gov. Ted Strickland, who is in a close contest with former Rep. John Kasich (R).
Ohio’s economy has been laggard for years, and the state continues to struggle with unemployment hovering around 10 percent. Obama and Biden—who joined him here for today’s rally—continued to place blame on Bush-era policies for the U.S. economy’s troubles.
In their pitch to Ohioans, Obama and Biden attempted to remind voters that while the economy remains difficult, the situation would be worse if they hadn’t introduced the a $700 billion stimulus package. They also praised Strickland’s leadership as governor, making the case that Ohio has started to move in the right direction with Strickland in the governor's mansion.
The crux of Obama’s and Biden’s message on the trail these last few weeks has been that Democrats have begun pulling the economy out of the doldrums that they say Bush-era policies caused. “Folks, we’re getting up and we’re going to make sure that the bankrupt policies of the Republican party don’t knock us down again,” Biden said. “We’re starting to get out of this God-awful mess the Republican Party left us with.”
Blaming Republicans would seem to be risky for a president who launched his presidential candidacy on changing the tenor of Washington. But White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod told reporters after Obama’s rally in Chicago on Saturday night that it’s important for the president to draw contrasts between the choices Americans face at the polls on Tuesday.
“That’s the nature of elections,” Axelrod said. “They are a competitive process. I don’t think this is any departure from that.”
Here in Ohio the Democrats have struggled mightily in the polls, but they have also been buoyed by a recent surge in the polls by Strickland.
Frustration in Ohio and elsewhere in the country may stem in part from the Obama administration’s projection that the stimulus plan would make a deeper dent in the nation’s unemployment rate, acknowledged Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), the state’s junior senator.
But Brown also suggested that part of the Democrats struggles are also due their inability to effectively articulate the successes he said the Democrats made in moving the economy forward.
“I think the Democrats for the first 18 months were governing and the Republicans were campaigning,” Brown said. “I think that cost us.”
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