President Barack Obama answers questions from the audience at a town hall at Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale Campus in Annandale, Virginia, April 19, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Jim Young
By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON | Wed Apr 20, 2011 12:26pm EDT
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama takes early steps on Wednesday to recapture the magic of his exuberant 2008 campaign on a West Coast swing that starts at the nexus of social communications, Facebook headquarters.
Democrats acknowledge that Obama will need to rally many of the same forces that propelled him into the White House in order to win re-election in 2012: an army of young, energetic voters as well as a sizable showing from independent voters.
By visiting Facebook headquarters in California's Silicon Valley, where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a folk hero, Obama seeks to connect to tens of millions of people who have adopted social media as a prime method of communications.
Obama is to hold a Facebook town-hall session on the ways to reduce the $1.4 trillion U.S. budget deficit at the company's offices in Palo Alto, California, before moving on to San Francisco for Democratic fund-raising events. He plans stops in Las Vegas and Los Angeles before returning to Washington on Friday.
Obama embarks on a deficit-cutting roadshow as policy- makers and financial markets recover from ratings agency Standard & Poor's threat to downgrade America's triple-A credit rating on worries Washington won't address its fiscal woes.
By focusing on the economy at events in two politically important states, the president hopes to engage on an issue that his future opponents are likely to exploit as a political weakness.
It is early in the 2012 election cycle, but clearly Obama has much work ahead. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Tuesday showed Obama's approval ratings near record lows because of deepening economic pessimism among Americans.
Ipsos pollster Cliff Young said rising gasoline prices are taking their toll but that they probably did not present a long-term problem for Obama.
"He is the odds-on favorite for a variety of reasons, primarily because he is an incumbent. His numbers are not that bad," said Young.
COMPETING IDEOLOGIES
Obama is using the first steps on the road to 2012 to promote a budget ideology that is at odds with the fiscal views of many Republicans who are planning presidential campaigns.
He wants to raise taxes on wealthier Americans to fund social programs while making some budget cuts, a plan he says would bring down deficits by $4 trillion over 12 years.
Republican Representative Paul Ryan would cut slightly more, $4.4 trillion over 10 years, without raising taxes. He would make deep cuts in spending, including overhauls in the Medicare and Medicaid health programs for the elderly and poor that Democrats say would violate the "social compact" with Americans.
Polling data released on Wednesday suggest Americans so far seem to be siding with Obama.
Data released from the ABC News/Washington Post poll on Wednesday said 72 percent of those surveyed favor higher taxes for wealthy Americans and 78 percent opposed to cutting health benefits for the elderly. The survey of 1,001 adults has a 3.5 percentage point error margin.
Focusing so much political energy on the deficit is a major shift in itself, analysts said.
"Now that is all everybody is talking about ... reducing the deficit," said Nigel Gault, an economist at Global Insight. "The terms of the debate have changed. That is progress."
But both Obama and Republicans continue to see their credibility questioned by outside critics.
Two days after the S&P warning, the French daily Le Monde published an article on Wednesday in which International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard said the United States lacks a credible medium-term deficit reduction plan.
(Additional reporting by Kim Dixon, Alister Bull and David Morgan; Writing by Steve Holland; Editing by Vicki Allen)
Credit: Reuters (www.reuters.com)
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