by Mike Dorning
HARRISBURG, Pa. — As Barack Obama caravans through the hardscrabble towns of rural Pennsylvania, he is making clear the politics of hope has an enemies list.
Oil companies, predatory lenders, highly paid corporate CEOs and health insurance companies all rank high on it
In between drop-ins at bowling alleys, sports bars and other blue-collar hangouts, Obama is stoking an us-against-them populism that makes common purpose with the grievances of working-class families feeling pinched by the hard economic times.
Despite his lead in national polls, Obama is engaged in a fierce struggle with rival Hillary Clinton heading into Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary, the next contest in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. And the white working-class voters he has had difficultly attracting in recent contests will be crucial to the outcome here.
With his sunny persona and more measured style, Obama does not match the hard-core populism that drove former Sen. John Edwards’ failed presidential campaign. But the Illinois senator, who also won the endorsement Monday of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), is showing plenty of outrage these days.
Among the first television ads he aired to introduce himself to Pennsylvania voters was a commercial excoriating Exxon Mobil for its $40 billion profit last year and blaming big oil companies that “block change” for rising gas prices. A President Obama, he vows, would make them “pay a penalty” with a windfall profits tax.At a town hall meeting in Lancaster, Pa., on Monday, his target was $19 million in bonuses awarded to the two top executives of sub-prime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial.
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“These are the folks who are responsible for infecting the economy and creating, helping create a home foreclosure crisis—2 million people may end up losing their homes,” Obama fumed, pacing back and forth in front of a wooden lectern.
“Now what’s wrong with this picture?” Obama continued, drawing shouts from the crowd. “Everything’s wrong with it. But the problem is we’ve almost come to expect it…because nobody in Washington seems to be outraged about it.”
In Pittsburgh, at a rally Friday that marked the beginning of a six-day bus tour through the state, a world view suspicious of corporate power even shaped Obama’s retelling of his biography.
He usually casts his early experience as a community organizer in uplifting terms that focus on the choice he made to pursue public service and lessons he learned about the power of ordinary people to create change. But in Pittsburgh, he put a darker spin on the period, portraying it as a struggle to right damage done by unseen “big corporations.”
“A lot of the economic decisions weren’t being made in the community,” Obama said, describing the shutdown of steel mills on Chicago’s South Side during the 1980s. “They were being made in New York and Dallas. They were a bunch of people shuffling paper and deciding to, you know, wreck entire communities without knowing sort of what it meant to those people.”
The approach represents a shift for a candidate whose persona has been so tied to hopes he can transcend racial and political divisions and unify the country.
But Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, said that it is not a thematic break for a campaign that has long stressed the corrosive influence of Washington lobbyists. And he noted confrontational speeches Obama gave to Detroit automakers last May challenging them on the environment and to the Wall Street financial community in September challenging them on an economy that serves the middle class.
“These are not new themes, but we’re certainly punching them hard here because they’re central to the concerns of people,” Axelrod said.
Obama ally Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), a social conservative with a large following among blue-collar voters in the state, appears to be a believer in the approach, enthusiastically presenting Obama as engaged in a struggle against power.
Casey regularly invokes the political forces arrayed against Obama in the state, suggesting a parallel between Obama’s campaign challenges and the economic forces stacked against Pennsylvania’s working families.
The Democratic political establishment, including Gov. Ed. Rendell and the mayors of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, has sided with rival Clinton, who leads in recent polls of the state.
“I know something about our state,” Casey told a crowd in Harrisburg, Pa, in a typical introduction, “Our state loves an underdog and a fighter, and we have one in Barack Obama.”