PITTSBURGH - For President Obama, it’s almost as if the election campaign never ended. Just look at his travel schedule.
The same states that Obama targeted to win the White House are seeing an awful lot of the president, Vice President Joe Biden, and top Cabinet officials. Only this year, the taxpayers are footing the multimillion-dollar tab for the trips, and Obama officials are delivering wheelbarrows of economic stimulus money - also compliments of taxpayers.
An Associated Press review of administration travel records shows that three of every four official trips Obama and his key lieutenants made in his first seven months in office were to the 28 states Obama won. Add trips to Missouri and Montana - both of which Obama narrowly lost - and almost 80 percent of the administration’s official domestic travel has been concentrated in states likely to be key to Obama’s reelection effort in 2012.
While similar data haven’t been compiled for previous administrations, new presidents traditionally have used official travel to shore up - and add to - their political base. Consider President George W. Bush’s travel record, for instance.
“When we were trying to build support for key policy initiatives, it made sense for President Bush to travel to states with persuadable citizens,’’ says Scott Stanzel, a former White House spokesman who was the press secretary for Bush’s 2004 reelection bid. “That meant visits to ‘purple states’ where people weren’t as likely to already support or oppose the president’s plans.’’
For Obama, the key policy initiative early on was a $787 billion economic stimulus package. While aimed at the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, it also gave the new administration a chance to reap political benefits traditionally reserved for lawmakers touting pork-barrel projects back home.
Though insisting that the stimulus legislation include no such “earmarked’’ congressional projects, Obama, Biden, and the Cabinet spent months traveling the country to announce billions of dollars in new federal job-creating money that was going for bridge construction and green-energy projects, and for extended unemployment benefits. Biden in particular has been the bearer of stimulus good news, making nearly two dozen trips to 14 states to tout the legislation and its impact on local communities.
The vice president has made five stimulus trips just to Pennsylvania, a must-win state in 2008 that never faded from Obama’s political planning meetings.
“In Performance at the White House: Fiesta Latina’’ continues a music series launched by Michelle Obama to highlight various genres of music. Jazz and country music events have been held. A classical music show is on tap for Nov. 4.
Yesterday’s musical extravaganza comes during the month dedicated to celebrating the culture and traditions of Hispanics, the nation’s largest minority group at 15 percent of the US population, according to Census Bureau figures.
Feliciano said he’s performed at the White House twice before, during the Reagan and Clinton administrations. “I’m bipartisan,’’ he told reporters during a break.
