PRESIDENT BARACK Obama might have wished for a warmer welcome.
On the second day of his three-day “American Jobs Act bus tour” yesterday, someone stole his lectern with the presidential seals, his teleprompter and $200,000 worth of audio equipment from a lorry in a hotel parking lot.
But the frosty reception from his fellow Democrats in Virginia must have hurt more.
In the 2008 presidential election, Mr Obama became the first Democrat to carry the state in more than four decades.
Now Democratic state legislators don’t want to be associated with their embattled leader, one month before local legislative elections.
They asked Mr Obama not to visit districts where members of his party are in danger of losing, the Washington Post reported.
The state house minority leader, Ward Armstrong, has even released a television advertisement where he rounds on his Republican opponent when the latter links him to Mr Obama: “That’s a stretch,” the Virginian Democrat says. “I’m pro-life, pro-gun and I always put Virginia first.”
One Democratic senator in Virginia has announced that he will not support Mr Obama for re-election next year.
Five other state Democratic legislators refused to tell the Washington Post whether they would support him or not.
So on the third and final day of his bus tour today, Mr Obama will discuss the importance of hiring American veterans – always a crowd pleaser – on a Virginia military base with the First Lady, and visit a firehouse before returning to Washington.
Republicans in the Senate blocked the $447 billion Jobs Act last week.
Mr Obama has made a joke of it, telling an audience in Jamestown, North Carolina yesterday, “It may just be that the Bill was too big the first time... It was confusing to them. So what we’re going to do is ... break it up into separate pieces and let them vote on each piece, one at a time.”
The Senate Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid, hopes to schedule a vote on the first “piece” of the dismembered Bill by Friday. It would spend $30 billion to create or save jobs in education – hence Mr Obama’s visit to a community college in Jamestown yesterday – and $5 billion for police and firefighters. The plan is unlikely to gain the 60 votes it would need to reach the Senate floor, and it hasn’t a hope of passing in the Republican-controlled House.
Other measures, including tax breaks for businesses that invest in new equipment, and a $4,800 tax credit for companies that hire veterans, have a better chance of passing.
While Mr Obama is ostensibly promoting his jobs Bill, which economists say would create nearly two million jobs, he is in re-election campaign mode.
If Congress votes against his proposals, “they don’t have to answer to me – they’re going to have to answer to you,” he said told the audience in Jamestown, to applause.
Mr Obama won North Carolina by just three-tenths of one per cent in 2008, and it’s going to be an uphill battle. This was his second visit in two months. In the hope of bolstering his chances in North Carolina, Democrats will hold their convention in Charlotte next summer.
The placards the President saw from his $1.1 million hi-tech black bus, nick-named ‘Ground Force One,‘ have not been encouraging. “We Believed. We Voted. Now What?” said one. “Giggles says: where’s the jobs?” said another.
Mr Obama yesterday ridiculed the “Real American Jobs Act” put forward by the Republicans to counter his plan.
“Here’s what the plan boils down to,” he said. “We’re going to gut environmental regulations. We’re going to drill more. We’re going to roll back Wall Street reform ... Now that’s a plan, but it’s not a jobs plan.”