Obama's fund-raising for 2012 starts among his earliest investors
President Barack Obama began his re-election fundraising drive yesterday in Chicago among some of his earliest political investors and near his 2012 campaign headquarters, telling supporters they have “still got business to do.”
Addressing donors at three fundraisers, Obama listed his first-term accomplishments, including a law overhauling the US health-care system and new regulations on the financial industry. The next challenge, he said, is bringing the budget into line and reducing the nation’s long-term deficit.
“If we apply some practical common sense to this, we can solve our fiscal challenges and still have the America that we believe in,” he told his hometown audience. “That’s what the 2012 campaign’s going to be about.”
The evening may raise more than $2 million for Obama and the Democratic National Committee, according to a party official not authorised to share the information. The second event, which attracted about 50 people to the upscale restaurant MK, had an admission price of $35,800 per person, according to the invitation.
“I’m prepared to finish the job,” said Obama, 49, who filed for re-election last week. “I hope you are too.”
Obama also sought to instil some of the idealism that propelled his first campaign for the White House.
“That campaign in 2008 wasn’t my campaign,” he told a crowd of more than 2,000 at Chicago’s Navy Pier. “It was your campaign.”
DEFICIT SPEECH
The president travelled to Chicago a day after outlining his approach to bringing down the nation’s cumulative deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years. He set a target of reducing the annual US deficit to 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product by 2015, compared with the 10.9 per cent of GDP projected for this year.
The Republican alternative, a budget drawn up by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, would cut $6.2 trillion over the next decade, largely by scaling back Medicare and Medicaid, the federal health-care programs for the elderly and the poor. It also would cut individual and corporate income taxes.
The president invoked his daughters in making the case for measured budget cuts.
“I don’t want a smaller America for Malia and Sasha, for your kids, for your grandkids,” he said at MK. “I want a big, generous, energised, optimistic country.”
Obama said his speech on the budget and the deficit was “not a partisan shot at the other side; it was an attempt to clarify the choice that we have as a country.”
‘NATION OF POTHOLES’
Under the Republican vision, he said, the nation wouldn’t be able to invest in roads, bridges and high-speed rail.
“We would be a nation of potholes,” he said.
The president was introduced by his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who will become Chicago’s mayor on May 16. Emanuel said Obama had brought the nation to the “doorstep” of an economic recovery.