Witcover: Obama on the road again

WASHINGTON -- In his continuing but uncertain effort to get in front of the parade of anger against corporate America kicked off by the Occupy Wall Street protests, President Barack Obama is on the bus-tour circuit again, this time through North Carolina and Virginia. It's a difficult maneuver he's undertaking.

The message is essentially more of his pitch for his $447 billion American Jobs Act (which Senate Republicans and a couple of Democrats already shot down), with a deft segue to the nation's financial industry, the prime target of the street protests.

While the demonstrators in New York and other cities have yet to distill their gripes into specific policy actions, Obama has been quick to identify himself with them by blaming the Republicans on Capitol Hill as Wall Street allies who have no plans to put Americans back to work.

Speaking at the Asheville, N.C., airport on the first leg of his three-day swing through two Dixie states he won in 2008, the president chided Republicans for failing so far to offer a detailed alternative to his package of roads and bridge construction and repair and other spurs to job creation.

"It turns out their plan breaks down to a few basic ideas," he jabbed. "They want to gut regulations. They want to let Wall Street do whatever it wants. ... They want to drill more. And they want to repeal health care reform. ... Their plan says the big problem we have is that we helped 30 million Americans get health insurance. They figure we should throw those folks off the health insurance rolls; somehow that's going to help people find jobs."

Obama then pivoted to Wall Street, the demon of the latest street protests he hopes to latch onto. "(The Republicans') plan says we should go back to the good old days before the financial crisis when Wall Street was writing its own rules. They want to roll back all the reforms we've put in place."

This was rhetorical red meat that the crowd gobbled up in full campaign mode. There was a time when Obama, trying to do business with the congressional Republicans, avoided such broadsides at the moneyed class. Those times seem behind him now. The opposition in response has been crying "class warfare," but Obama appears finally willing to declare which side of the war he's on.

The fact that his 2012 campaign war chest is already bursting with money from financial interests, as well as from reported millions of individual givers, seems to raise no bar to the president's freewheeling assault on Wall Street. However, his immediate targets on this bus tour are the congressional Republicans blocking the jobs bill.

The administration strategy, after the rejection of his comprehensive jobs plan, is to go back with a piece-by-piece approach. It may not have more success, but it will oblige the Republicans to turn each piece down and provide more ammunition to Democrats to cast them as obstructionists in the effort to get the nation's jobless working again.

"They've got their plan and you've got my plan," Obama said at the Asheville airport stop. "So we're going to give members of Congress another chance to step up to the plate and do the right thing. ... We're going to give them another chance to do their jobs by looking after your jobs."

The first bite, the president said, will be "whether we should put hundreds of thousands of teachers back in the classroom and cops back on the street and firefighters back to work." It's a portion designed to force the Republicans to swallow or gag on, as the president tries to cast them as heartless protectors of Wall Street and the wealthy.

It's been the classic Democratic pitch since the days of FDR's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and party liberals have been longing to hear it from Obama ever since the economic crisis bombarded the country, the poor and middle class especially.

The chance that it will oblige the congressional Republicans to go into a defensive crouch and yield a little on his jobs plan still seems remote. But at least it could shore up Democrats' spirits and as Obama campaigns not only for that plan but also for his re-election next year.

Tribune Media Services columnist Jules Witcover's email address is juleswitcover@comcast.net.