Obama continues bus tour in North Carolina

President Barack Obama bounced up to podium in a community college gymnasium Tuesday in front of a big blue banner that bore the name of his proposed jobs package yet looked like a re-election campaign sign.

Obama's hand-shaking, picture-taking, two-day bus tour of North Carolina seemed as much about reaching out to voters in a key election battleground state as putting pressure on Congress to pass his jobs package.

"People are gracious and kind -- even the people who don't vote for me," Obama said, explaining his frequent trips to North Carolina. "People realize our problems didn't come up overnight, they won't be solved overnight."

Obama supporter Mac Sims of Greensboro attended the rally at Guilford Technical Community College, where the president was pushing a proposal to raise taxes on millionaires while protecting the jobs of teachers and firefighters. Sims said Obama has to take his case to the people since congressional Republicans have dug in to prevent a successful economic recovery ahead of next year's elections.

"The president is offering solutions to address the economic situation whereas it seems some members of Congress are looking more for ways to stop the president from being re-elected rather than working for the American people," said Sims, who works with a Greensboro community development nonprofit that tries to encourage entrepreneurship. "If you constantly hear one side, you're not hearing the complete side of it."

The North Carolina Republican Party contends the president's bus tour is a campaign swing that demonizes the GOP. The president should have known "that his time, and taxpayer dollars, would have been better spent if he had just stayed in D.C. trying to pass a jobs bill that would actually work," GOP Chair Robin Hayes said.

The bus tour, which is rolling on taxpayer money and included neighboring swing state Virginia, is not a campaign trip and that choosing the two states was not a political calculation to pump up the president in states he won narrowly in 2008, White House officials said. Obama won North Carolina's electoral votes by a margin of less than one percent out of 4.2 million votes.

But North Carolina's importance to Obama was made clear when Charlotte was picked to host next year's Democratic National Convention.

An Elon University poll earlier this month shows Obama has work cut out for him to stay in the White House. The poll showed the president's approval rating in North Carolina at 42 percent.

Obama campaign officials hope that the state's demographic shifts and the ballot-box choice between the incumbent and the Republican nominee will make the difference. The state's financial services, biotech and information technology industries have attracted better-educated and suburban transplants to North Carolina who have done better since the recession than manufacturing towns like Marion, which Obama visited Monday.

Obama also could see hope in longer-term demographic changes that have seen North Carolina become one of the country's four greatest gainers in the population of blacks in the past decade, and Hispanic residents more than doubling since 2000, according to Census figures. Blacks and Hispanics have tended to support Democratic candidates.

But the country's economic troubles remain Obama's biggest headwind, his supporters acknowledge.

"I think any time there's trouble in the economy people tend to blame the president and Congress and whoever's in charge. I still believe he received a tough situation when he came into office. I think he's been doing the best he can to deal with it, given the political realities," said Annette Lineberger, 58, a technical writer for an engineering company. "We'll never know what would have happened if the bailouts hadn't happened."

Her husband, retired teacher Danny Lineberger, said he is a year-round volunteer for the local Democratic Party who expects to commit full time to next year's Obama campaign.

"He's done his best to work with Congress. People criticize him for being a moderate -- thank God. It's nice to have a moderate in there, not somebody who's far right or far left," said Lineberger, 64, of Greensboro. "I just think of all the kids who have health care who wouldn't have health care otherwise because they got onto their parents' health care plan. I think he's stopped the economy from tanking."

Sandra Kay Lawson-Crump, 57, a Winston-Salem minister sporting an Obama baseball cap and big round earrings bearing the president's picture, said she believes Obama's job-boosting efforts will help his re-election effort. She said she and other Democrats already are hard at work registering voters at Pop Warner football games and community festivals ahead of next year.

"We've already cranked it up," Lawson-Crump said. "No. 1 is the jobs thing -- when you mess with people's money, that's a sensitive spot."