WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama leaves the White House on Monday for a three-day bus trip, talking job creation at small towns across the Midwest in hopes of distancing himself from the “partisan brinksmanship” he says has poisoned the economy.
The trip isn’t likely to be without bumps. Polls find that the partisan feud over raising the debt ceiling, the stock market gyrations and a stubborn unemployment rate have left Americans more pessimistic about the economy and their future than at any other time this year.
Republicans have accused Obama of mixing policy with politics by barnstorming in the battleground region — at taxpayer expense.
But White House advisers said it was a chance for the president — who spent most of last month trapped in Washington with lawmakers blaming one another for the debt impasse — to hit the reset button and connect with ordinary Americans in a bus that could roll into small towns, rather than Air Force One.
“Democrats, independents and Republicans expect to see their president of the United States outside of Washington, D.C., out from behind the podium, spending time talking to the American people in their communities,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
Obama appears to be trying out a campaign theme by blaming Congress — without a direct mention of Republicans — for the bitterness that led to an eleventh-hour debt-limit agreement. Earnest said the president was expecting to hear more anger on the road.
Obama will be traveling to Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, three states he won in 2008 but that saw Republican gains last year.
He needs the states in his column next year, and White House officials acknowledged that the president is likely to get an earful over his role in the debt-ceiling deal, with some progressives accusing him of caving to Republicans.
“I anticipate that there will be some people who are supporters of the president, who voted for him last time, who will have some questions for him about the compromises that he was willing to make,” Earnest said.
A poll conducted for McClatchy Newspapers suggests that voters don’t blame Obama for the economy, but his favorability rating has plummeted to the lowest levels of his term in other polls.
The trip outside the capital gives him an opportunity to reject some of the toxicity that Washington now represents, said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public ap in New York, which conducted the survey for McClatchy.
“He wants to demonstrate in a very clear way that he is outside of Washington and is trying to turn the page on the unpleasantness of what has gone on,” Miringoff said.
