Reuters/Washington
President Barack Obama returns tomorrow to an Illinois town that has been a touchstone for his plan to rebuild America’s manufacturing sector, giving the first in a series of speeches that will set the tone for his fiscal battles with Congress in the fall.
The White House said the address in Galesburg, Ill. will lay out Obama’s priorities in the face of a pair of expected fights with Republicans over raising the government’s debt limit and the budget for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct 1.
“The President wants to talk about the issues that should be at the core of that debate,” senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer said in an email announcing the speech.
The speech signals Obama’s plans to go on the offensive with his jobs message this summer after months of defending his administration, which has suffered recent setbacks in Congress and been accused of abuses by civil libertarians as well as conservatives.
Obama will introduce some new economic ideas this summer, Pfeiffer said, although it was not clear what those would be.
Galesburg, a town of about 30,000 people, lost more than 900 jobs after Maytag, now owned by Whirlpool Corp, announced in 2004 that it would shut down a refrigerator factory.
Then-Senator Obama met with workers, and spoke about them at the Democratic National Convention that year, when he first turned heads as a potential future presidential candidate.
He also gave a commencement address at Knox College in Galesburg in 2005 and mentioned the town’s struggles in his State of the Union speech in 2010.
A Knox College study of what happened to the Maytag workers found that six years after the plant closed, the workers’ median household income had dropped by $10,000, and 40% of those surveyed said they would never recover financially.
Most of them felt the “American Dream” was out of reach, according to study results published in 2011 by the Galesburg Register-Mail newspaper.
Obama has often said jobs are his top priority, with unemployment remaining stubbornly high above 7%.
But he has spent much of his second term battling Republicans over other priorities such as gun control, immigration reform, and the roll-out of his landmark 2010 healthcare restructuring law.
The Democratic president also has been put on the defensive to explain government surveillance programmes after a former US government contractor leaked information about phone and e-mail collection programmes aimed at Americans as well as allies abroad.
His Galesburg address comes the week after the biggest municipal bankruptcy filing in American history, in Detroit - a former manufacturing powerhouse and the historic centre of the US automotive industry.
Obama played a key role in helping to bail out the auto sector in 2009, but the White House is now struggling to determine how it can help Detroit get back on its feet financially.
Obama, who will give a number of similar speeches this summer, will present new ideas as well as some familiar arguments to seek the upper hand in the economic debate in his Galesburg address, Pfeiffer said.