A familiar face visits Mansfield

By Matt Echel­berry
Inquirer Reporter

With 97 days until the Nov. 6 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Pres­i­dent Bar­rack Obama vis­ited Mans­field on Aug. 1 for a brief speech in front of more than 1,000 sup­port­ers. Sev­eral blocks in the down­town area of the city were blocked off for the event at Cen­tral Park and secu­rity was very high.

For­mer Ohio Gov­er­nor Ted Strick­land was in atten­dance and spoke briefly at the begin­ning of the cer­e­mony. He has been serv­ing as co-chairman for Obama’s re-election cam­paign and got the crowd “fired up,” part of one of the many cam­paign slogans.

Local busi­ness owner Brenda Baker (Fast Eddie’s Pizza in Bel­lville) had the honor of intro­duc­ing the pres­i­dent, who flew over the park by heli­copter. When Obama approached the podium just min­utes later and waved to the cheer­ing crowd, the park quickly became silent for his speech.

Begin­ning at 11:45 that morn­ing, Obama first rec­og­nized the Amer­i­can ath­letes com­pet­ing at the Olympics, includ­ing the 17 ath­letes from Ohio. Then he dis­cussed the elec­tion and the issues many Amer­i­cans are con­cerned about. “My first order of busi­ness is to recover all the jobs lost to the wealth depression…Beyond that, we’re here to reclaim the finan­cial secu­rity that has been stripped away for over a decade,” he stated.

The pres­i­dent asked the audi­ence to think about every­thing pos­i­tive that Amer­ica has going: the best work­ers, the best con­gress­men and the best edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions. “Peo­ple want to come here from every cor­ner of the globe,” he con­tin­ued. “So no mat­ter what the nay say­ers tell us, not mat­ter how dark things may look, there is not another coun­try on Earth that would not gladly trade places with the United States of America.”

He cited pol­i­tics and a lack of com­pro­mise between the two par­ties as the major prob­lem in the coun­try. He also bashed top down eco­nom­ics, which his oppo­nent, Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Mit Rom­ney, is in favor of, say­ing that it would only hurt the mid­dle class. Accord­ing to him, under Romney’s plan indi­vid­u­als earn­ing more than $3 mil­lion in income would receive a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars in tax breaks.

“Under my opponent’s plan, who do you think gets the bill for these $250, 000 tax cuts? You do, and you don’t have to take my word for it.” He then ref­er­enced a study by inde­pen­dent researchers, who said the plan would cause a tax increase for the mid­dle class of more than $2,000 per household.

“I promise you we will not get there if we adopt these ideas that some­how spend­ing more on tax cuts for mil­lion­aires and bil­lion­aires who don’t need them–and aren’t even ask­ing for them–is actu­ally going to improve the econ­omy. We tried that and it did not work,” Obama concluded.

He con­tin­ued to point out some of the main dif­fer­ences between his plan and Romney’s, like keep­ing jobs in the United States and con­tin­ued tax breaks for mid­dle class fam­i­lies. How­ever, he said that fix­ing the national eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion is not only about cre­at­ing more jobs, but grow­ing the econ­omy over the long haul.

“All I’m ask­ing you to do is con­tribute just a lit­tle bit more to help con­tinue grow­ing the economy…And I’m going to make sure the gov­ern­ment does its part. We can make more cuts…but not by cut­ting the invest­ments that have always kept the mid­dle class strong.”

“Wouldn’t we be bet­ter off in mak­ing higher edu­ca­tion more afford­able? Wouldn’t we be bet­ter off if we kept invest­ing in man­u­fac­tur­ing, so we can sell goods around the world stamped with the words ‘Made in Mans­field, Ohio’? Wouldn’t we be bet­ter off if we had the courage to keep mov­ing forward?”

Obama ended his 20-minute address by express­ing his faith in Amer­i­cans. He said that faith is stronger than ever and asked for Mansfield’s sup­port this November.