Barack Obama battling back to ensure Iowa result is not the last straw

Published on Sunday 14 August 2011 21:35

President Barack Obama will launch a political counter-offensive this week, weighed down by withering support among some of his most ardent backers, a stunted economy and a daily bashing from the Republicans campaigning for his job.

"We've still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn't get into this mess overnight, and it's going to take time to get out of it," the president told the US over the weekend, all but pleading for people to stick with him.

A deeply unsettled political landscape, with voters in a fiercely anti-incumbent mood, is framing the 2012 presidential race 15 months before the country decides whether to give Mr Obama a second term or hand power to the Republicans.

With his approval numbers sliding, the Democratic president will try to ease their worries and sustain his resurrected fighting spirit when he sets off today on a bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. The trip is timed to dilute the buzz emanating from the Midwest after Republicans gathered in Iowa over the weekend for a first test of the party's White House candidates.

"You have just sent a message that Barack Obama will be a one-term president," Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann told elated supporters minutes after winning Saturday's Iowa straw poll – essentially a fund-raising event that also tests a candidate's organisational and financial strength.

She spent heavily and travelled across the state where she was born, casting herself as the evangelical Christian voice of the deeply conservative small-government, low-tax Tea Party wing of the Republican Party.

The contest to challenge Mr Obama in November 2012 lost one candidate and gained another. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty yesterday withdrew from the race for the Republican nomination, hours after finishing a disappointing third in the Iowa straw poll.

But on Saturday, in South Carolina, Texas governor Rick Perry made a cleverly timed entrance into the race.

In a speech, Perry said the president was presiding over an "economic disaster," in a declaration that stole some of Ms Bachmann's political thunder.

Mr Obama made a pre-emptive strike in his weekly radio and internet address to the nation on Saturday, saying it was the Republicans running for president and serving in Congress who were at work crushing voters' hopes and dreams.

But the question remains: Will Mr Obama sustain the counter-attack? Of late, he's been seen by even his staunch supporters as too ready to retreat from critical ground when confronted by intransigent Republicans.

Working in Mr Obama's favour is that the Republicans are struggling to find a candidate who lights a fire with voters. But Mr Obama's re-election could be in peril for lack of a strong message about what he will do to lift the country out of economic malaise and political deadlock.

Polls show voters hold both parties to blame for the stunted economic recovery; an unseemly political fight over raising the limit on US borrowing; an anaemic deal to cut the government deficit; the subsequent downgrade of the country's credit rating; wild stock market gyrations and an unemployment rate stuck above 9 per cent.

In the face of that, Mr Obama is tacking to put some wind in his re-election sails, apparently convinced that he can gather speed by turning up the attack on Congress.

"You've got a right to be frustrated," the president said in his weekend address. "I am. Because you deserve better. I don't think it's too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering."

He chastised Republican brinkmanship, saying "some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win".

Even as Mr Obama's bus tour has designs on blunting the Iowa Republican festivities, it will have to compete for attention as the country digests Mr Perry's attacking speech.

Mr Perry, a former Democrat and the nation's longest-serving governor, told his appreciative audience that Mr Obama's government had "an insatiable desire to spend our children's inheritance".

And he accused Mr Obama of presiding over an "economic disaster" that has been "downgrading our hope for a better future".