Newspaper Reax

Media weighs in on Bam's bus tour.

USA Today: "...White House officials insist the trip is about jobs, not votes....[and pointed] out that the trip is fully on the taxpayers' dime, not the president's re-election campaign's."

NYT: "After being cloistered in Washington for a month haggling with Congressional leaders, Mr. Obama will embark on a bus tour of the Midwest the week of Aug. 15 — a chance to show his commitment to reviving the economy in a region of important electoral battlegrounds, and to turn the page from the tangled, often toxic, debate in the capital."

LAT: "It doesn’t seem coincidental that Obama is concentrating on a part of the map that was central to his commanding electoral college victory in 2008."

WSJ: "Those two states hadn't backed a Democrat for president for decades... Now, they have re-emerged as potential leverage in the hard-fought battle to come."