President Barack Obama returned Wednesday to Elkhart, Indiana – the first city he visited after taking office. “It is not created to help you”. He dismissed those GOP voices as “anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-trade and let’s face it, anti-change”.
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Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly seized on the erosion of US manufacturing in his campaign, threatening to impose greater tariffs on foreign trading partners. “It’s just not”, Obama said to a largely supportive crowd at a local high school.
In his final year in office, Obama has been returning to sites in the US with significance for his presidential tenure. Even seven years in, the labor market is still sub-par, Sherk noted.
Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, while praising Obama’s administration, have also raised economic concerns, including increased college costs and income inequality.
For Democrats, Obama’s renewed popularity nationally is enough that the party is firmly embracing his policies in the presidential election, especially on the economy. Given polling data, voters in Elkhart aren’t likely customers for what the president was selling.
“By nearly every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the beginning of my presidency”, he said, to a roomful of applause that lasted a full minute.
Without ever identifying Trump by name, Obama aimed to discredit his policy proposals, underscoring his belief that a President Trump would return the United States to the depths of the financial crisis.
“I told you then that I was going to have your back”, he said of his first visit. The area remains heavily dependent on manufacturing jobs, especially in the recreational vehicle industry, despite Obama’s 2009 pitch for electric car-related jobs.
“There are many reasons for the remarkable economic recovery that has been created in IN but I believe most of the credit belongs to the hard-working people of this community and the state”, Pence wrote in an editorial in the Elkhart Truth. Opposition to the president has been particularly unrelenting in conservative stretches of the Midwest like in, which Obama won in 2008 but lost decisively four years later. Home foreclosures are also down in Elkhart and throughout the country, he said.
“When I hear working families thinking about voting for those plans”, Obama said, “then I want to have an intervention”.
Obama argued they were wrong, since black unemployment was still twice as high as white unemployment and Hispanic women earned 55 cents for every dollar earned by a white man. -Obama warned voters against listening to Trump’s political argument.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Obama has a “legacy of economic malaise”, and “Americans deserve more than a victory lap celebrating stagnant wages, lukewarm economic growth, (and) persistently high poverty rates”. We’re open for business.
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In Elkhart, unemployment was peaking at 19.6 percent.
