WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has hardly avoided the campaign trail this year, appearing across the country to raise money for candidates and urge supporters to get out to the polls in November.
His appearance at a public rally just outside Washington, D.C., on Thursday was unique in this regard: The candidate invited him to be there.
Obama came to Bowie, Md., to support the re-election campaign of Gov. Martin O’Malley, saying he “made tough choices in tough times to move Maryland forward.”
“I’m hope you’re ready to fight,” he told thousands of backers at Bowie State University who gathered on a large, sun-splashed campus quad. “There’s an election coming up. It’s going to say a lot about the future — your future, but also the future of the country.”
The last time Obama appeared at a public event at the invitation of a fellow Democrat was in January, when he sought to boost Martha Coakley’s flagging and ultimately unsuccessful campaign for Edward Kennedy’s former Senate seat.
For O’Malley, the decision to bring Obama in was a no-brainer; a recent Washington Post poll pegged the president’s job approval rating in Maryland at over 60 percent. But with Obama’s job rating slipping in many key states, other Democrats have been more reluctant to appear with their party’s leader.
They have welcomed his financial drawing power, however. Through September, the president has headlined nearly 50 fundraisers this year, according to CBS’s Mark Knoller, unofficial statistician of the White House press corps.
After the Maryland rally, the president traveled home to Chicago for a series of fundraisers benefitting local Democratic candidates, especially Senate hopeful Alexi Giannoulias.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
