Politico (by Josh Gerstein): For most presidents, election-year international travel is something to be dreaded and avoided, lest voters believe their leader is ignoring more pressing domestic concerns.
For President Barack Obama, who is still trying to pull the country out of its economic doldrums, that’s particularly risky.
But Obama’s weekend trip to Cartagena, Colombia, for the Summit of the Americas could be the rare election-year sojourn that’s almost all political upside for him and his reelection bid.
Here are five reasons why the whirlwind visit to Latin America could pay off for Obama:
A play for the Latino vote back home
With crises simmering in Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan, the White House is portraying the Latin America trip as a respite of sorts and an exchange with neighbors who are, in the case of many Americans, family.
“There’s a lot of pride. Just like Italians love to see the president go to Italy and Poles like to see him go to Poland and Jews like to see him go to Israel,” said Bernard Aronson, assistant secretary of state for Latin America under President George H.W. Bush. “People from Latin America like to see him go to their home countries [and] show respect.”
The White House had ample opportunity to bat down the idea that politics at home could influence Obama’s agenda abroad but didn’t even try to do so.
During a pre-trip briefing this week, a reporter asked if the trip was in part “a message to Latino voters in the U.S.” and an attempt “to show Hispanics in the U.S. that the president cares about Latin America.”
“The president recognizes the deep interest that so many Americans have in our relationship with Latin America given their family ties in the region. So therefore, he views these trips as an important opportunity to demonstrate the close connections within the Americas and the significance that the United States places on our relations within the hemisphere,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes replied. “It is very much a part of our agenda to signal the deep interconnections among the peoples of the Americas, the ways in which the United States is enriched by immigration from Latin America to the United States.”
More U.S. residents trace their origins to Mexico than any other country — by far. But other Latino subgroups are large enough that they could influence a close election. Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans each number over 1 million in the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. With about 30 heads of state expected to attend, the summit gives Obama a rare, efficient opportunity to tap into the national pride among many groups at once.
While Colombia is hosting the meeting in part to undo the country’s pop-culture reputation as a narcotrafficking hub, about 900,000 U.S. residents now trace their roots to that South American nation.
Erick Langer, director of Georgetown’s Center for Latin American Studies, cautions that because U.S. Latinos are generally young and the fact that many aren’t U.S. citizens, the group’s electoral impact has always lagged its raw population numbers.
“It’s a relatively small number who are actually naturalized citizens but certainly, [attending the summit] will help Obama,” he said.
Rhodes acknowledged that Friday.
“Many Americans, of course, can trace their origins to Latin America and so those people — the people connections are incredibly important here in the United States and to people across the hemisphere, and that’s another theme that the president will be able to underscore throughout his travels,” he said.
Soak up Spanish-language media coverage
While the summit is unlikely to draw much attention from the English-language press, the Spanish-language media are getting ready for over-the-top, saturation coverage. In fact, it’s already under way.
CNN’s Spanish-language network, CNN en Español, has docked a cruise ship near Cartagena’s Convention Center. The vessel, dubbed the “CNN Cruise,” has been “specially conditioned for CNN en Español’s production team,” a statement from the network said.
Obama did his best to amp up the coverage by sitting down Friday with Telemundo for an interview that’s certain to get huge play on the Miami-based Spanish TV network watched by Latinos across the U.S.
Obama used the interview to talk about the administration’s response to the North Korean rocket launch, but also as a chance to talk immigration politics.
“Somehow Republicans want to have it both ways, they want to vote against these laws and appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment when we have a nominee who said that Arizona laws, which allow those same kids with Latino surnames to potentially be picked up and asked for their papers, and then they come and say: ‘But we really care about getting this issue resolved once and for all.’ That looks like hypocrisy to me,” Obama said.
He added, “What I want to see is folks to be serious about getting this issue resolved once and for all. I am prepared to do it. I am going to fight for it, I am going to push for it, and I think the vast majority of Democrats are going to do so as well.”
Other interviews with Spanish-language outlets are also in the works, a White House spokesman said.
The publicity should dovetail conveniently with a well-honed administration strategy of directing specific messages about issues of concern to Latinos, like immigration, into the Spanish-language press and rarely bringing those issues up in front of English-language audiences and media.
That includes Cuba policy, which the president discussed in an interview with the newspaper El Tiempo.
“History shows that the desire for freedom and human dignity can’t be denied forever. No authoritarian regime will last forever. The day will come in which the Cuban people will be free to determine its own destiny,” Obama said, according to a translation of the interview. “While we wait for that day, I maintain my commitment to support the Cuban people in their desire to freely determine Cuba’s future, and that the support will make them less dependent on the state that denies them their universal rights.”
Swing-state fever: A bonus stop in Florida
Sure, Obama was just in Florida on Tuesday, but that didn’t stop him from coming back around again Friday.
Instead of having the president fly directly to Colombia, the White House laid on a stop in Tampa, where Obama delivered a speech Friday afternoon about trade with Latin America. Such “jobs, jobs, jobs” events have become almost de rigueur before Obama’s trips abroad recently as part of an effort to inoculate the president against perceptions his foreign travels are detached from the economic problems of average Americans.
For Obama, it’s a double whammy since he gets to push the jobs right in the I-4 corridor, squeezing in a key message in a key part of a state that could be pivotal to his reelection chances and where he’s been struggling in the polls.
“While I am in Colombia talking with other leaders, I will be thinking about you,” the president told the crowd at the Port of Tampa on Friday, drawing the connection.
“One of the ways we’ve helped American business sell their products around the world is by calling out our competitors, making sure they’re playing by the same rules,” he added. “For example, we’ve brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration. We just brought a new case last month. And we’ve set up a trade enforcement unit that’s designed to investigate any questionable trade practices taking place anywhere in the world.”
Plugging the “Buffett Rule” theme
The White House has spent the week working hard to draw attention to Obama’s proposal for the so-called Buffett Rule — a minimum tax rate for the wealthy. It’s named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, a backer of the idea.
Obama will find significant support for those kinds of social equity ideas among the Latin American leaders he’ll meet this weekend. In fact, one of the summit’s stated themes is “addressing poverty and inequality.”
However, Obama will have to guard against getting carried away in the company of some leaders whose politics do trend more in the direction of socialism and who don’t see redistribution of wealth as a dirty word.
“The Summit of the Americas very much expresses the fact that Latin America is a growing continent and has grown by distributing income and engaging in a social inclusion or social mainstreaming process,” Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said during a meeting with Obama at the White House earlier this week.
Maybe focusing on foreign policy isn’t so bad
Obama’s likely to face a series of thorny issues during the weekend summit. Several other leaders, including Colombian president and summit host Juan Manuel Santos, are planning to press him to consider decriminalizing drugs. Brazil’s upset with U.S. currency policies. And officials across the region feel a bit neglected by a White House preoccupied with the Iranian nuclear crisis and the economic meltdown in Europe.
However, it’s Americans who’ll decide Obama’s political future this fall and they’re actually fairly pleased with his work abroad. In a Washington Post-ABC poll taken earlier this month, voters favored Obama over likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney, 53 percent to 36 percent, when asked which candidate they would trust to handle international affairs. Obama held a stronger advantage over Romney on foreign policy than on any issue relating directly to the economy, the pollsters found.
“The charge that a president who travels abroad is somehow seen as being insensitive to domestic economic concerns is overblown,” Aronson said. “Clearly, they’re sensitive to that [but] I actually think the politicians are wrong about this. … Americans want the president to play that role.”
Obama’s team is playing up the importance of the travel and the direct connection to domestic issues.
“I think we made the case at a number of our foreign trips recently that the economic future of the United States is very much tied to our ability to export to new markets and to deepen our economic relationships around the world. So that was a theme of our trip to the Asia-Pacific region, which is the fastest-growing region in the world,” Rhodes said.
Aronson said Obama’s bigger problem may not be that he’s spending too much time on foreign policy but that some of his election-year overseas trips — like the roughly 48-hour jaunt scheduled this week — are so short, some foreigners may see them as an insult.
“The sort of quickie trips leave a little feeling of ‘Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am, and don’t love ’em in the morning.’ I don’t they’re really the right message you want to send,” Aronson added. “I don’t think he serves himself well in terms of foreign policy by doing that.”
For President Barack Obama, who is still trying to pull the country out of its economic doldrums, that’s particularly risky.
But Obama’s weekend trip to Cartagena, Colombia, for the Summit of the Americas could be the rare election-year sojourn that’s almost all political upside for him and his reelection bid.
Here are five reasons why the whirlwind visit to Latin America could pay off for Obama:
A play for the Latino vote back home
With crises simmering in Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan, the White House is portraying the Latin America trip as a respite of sorts and an exchange with neighbors who are, in the case of many Americans, family.
“There’s a lot of pride. Just like Italians love to see the president go to Italy and Poles like to see him go to Poland and Jews like to see him go to Israel,” said Bernard Aronson, assistant secretary of state for Latin America under President George H.W. Bush. “People from Latin America like to see him go to their home countries [and] show respect.”
The White House had ample opportunity to bat down the idea that politics at home could influence Obama’s agenda abroad but didn’t even try to do so.
During a pre-trip briefing this week, a reporter asked if the trip was in part “a message to Latino voters in the U.S.” and an attempt “to show Hispanics in the U.S. that the president cares about Latin America.”
“The president recognizes the deep interest that so many Americans have in our relationship with Latin America given their family ties in the region. So therefore, he views these trips as an important opportunity to demonstrate the close connections within the Americas and the significance that the United States places on our relations within the hemisphere,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes replied. “It is very much a part of our agenda to signal the deep interconnections among the peoples of the Americas, the ways in which the United States is enriched by immigration from Latin America to the United States.”
More U.S. residents trace their origins to Mexico than any other country — by far. But other Latino subgroups are large enough that they could influence a close election. Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans each number over 1 million in the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. With about 30 heads of state expected to attend, the summit gives Obama a rare, efficient opportunity to tap into the national pride among many groups at once.
While Colombia is hosting the meeting in part to undo the country’s pop-culture reputation as a narcotrafficking hub, about 900,000 U.S. residents now trace their roots to that South American nation.
Erick Langer, director of Georgetown’s Center for Latin American Studies, cautions that because U.S. Latinos are generally young and the fact that many aren’t U.S. citizens, the group’s electoral impact has always lagged its raw population numbers.
“It’s a relatively small number who are actually naturalized citizens but certainly, [attending the summit] will help Obama,” he said.
Rhodes acknowledged that Friday.
“Many Americans, of course, can trace their origins to Latin America and so those people — the people connections are incredibly important here in the United States and to people across the hemisphere, and that’s another theme that the president will be able to underscore throughout his travels,” he said.
Soak up Spanish-language media coverage
While the summit is unlikely to draw much attention from the English-language press, the Spanish-language media are getting ready for over-the-top, saturation coverage. In fact, it’s already under way.
CNN’s Spanish-language network, CNN en Español, has docked a cruise ship near Cartagena’s Convention Center. The vessel, dubbed the “CNN Cruise,” has been “specially conditioned for CNN en Español’s production team,” a statement from the network said.
Obama did his best to amp up the coverage by sitting down Friday with Telemundo for an interview that’s certain to get huge play on the Miami-based Spanish TV network watched by Latinos across the U.S.
Obama used the interview to talk about the administration’s response to the North Korean rocket launch, but also as a chance to talk immigration politics.
“Somehow Republicans want to have it both ways, they want to vote against these laws and appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment when we have a nominee who said that Arizona laws, which allow those same kids with Latino surnames to potentially be picked up and asked for their papers, and then they come and say: ‘But we really care about getting this issue resolved once and for all.’ That looks like hypocrisy to me,” Obama said.
He added, “What I want to see is folks to be serious about getting this issue resolved once and for all. I am prepared to do it. I am going to fight for it, I am going to push for it, and I think the vast majority of Democrats are going to do so as well.”
Other interviews with Spanish-language outlets are also in the works, a White House spokesman said.
The publicity should dovetail conveniently with a well-honed administration strategy of directing specific messages about issues of concern to Latinos, like immigration, into the Spanish-language press and rarely bringing those issues up in front of English-language audiences and media.
That includes Cuba policy, which the president discussed in an interview with the newspaper El Tiempo.
“History shows that the desire for freedom and human dignity can’t be denied forever. No authoritarian regime will last forever. The day will come in which the Cuban people will be free to determine its own destiny,” Obama said, according to a translation of the interview. “While we wait for that day, I maintain my commitment to support the Cuban people in their desire to freely determine Cuba’s future, and that the support will make them less dependent on the state that denies them their universal rights.”
Swing-state fever: A bonus stop in Florida
Sure, Obama was just in Florida on Tuesday, but that didn’t stop him from coming back around again Friday.
Instead of having the president fly directly to Colombia, the White House laid on a stop in Tampa, where Obama delivered a speech Friday afternoon about trade with Latin America. Such “jobs, jobs, jobs” events have become almost de rigueur before Obama’s trips abroad recently as part of an effort to inoculate the president against perceptions his foreign travels are detached from the economic problems of average Americans.
For Obama, it’s a double whammy since he gets to push the jobs right in the I-4 corridor, squeezing in a key message in a key part of a state that could be pivotal to his reelection chances and where he’s been struggling in the polls.
“While I am in Colombia talking with other leaders, I will be thinking about you,” the president told the crowd at the Port of Tampa on Friday, drawing the connection.
“One of the ways we’ve helped American business sell their products around the world is by calling out our competitors, making sure they’re playing by the same rules,” he added. “For example, we’ve brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration. We just brought a new case last month. And we’ve set up a trade enforcement unit that’s designed to investigate any questionable trade practices taking place anywhere in the world.”
Plugging the “Buffett Rule” theme
The White House has spent the week working hard to draw attention to Obama’s proposal for the so-called Buffett Rule — a minimum tax rate for the wealthy. It’s named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, a backer of the idea.
Obama will find significant support for those kinds of social equity ideas among the Latin American leaders he’ll meet this weekend. In fact, one of the summit’s stated themes is “addressing poverty and inequality.”
However, Obama will have to guard against getting carried away in the company of some leaders whose politics do trend more in the direction of socialism and who don’t see redistribution of wealth as a dirty word.
“The Summit of the Americas very much expresses the fact that Latin America is a growing continent and has grown by distributing income and engaging in a social inclusion or social mainstreaming process,” Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said during a meeting with Obama at the White House earlier this week.
Maybe focusing on foreign policy isn’t so bad
Obama’s likely to face a series of thorny issues during the weekend summit. Several other leaders, including Colombian president and summit host Juan Manuel Santos, are planning to press him to consider decriminalizing drugs. Brazil’s upset with U.S. currency policies. And officials across the region feel a bit neglected by a White House preoccupied with the Iranian nuclear crisis and the economic meltdown in Europe.
However, it’s Americans who’ll decide Obama’s political future this fall and they’re actually fairly pleased with his work abroad. In a Washington Post-ABC poll taken earlier this month, voters favored Obama over likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney, 53 percent to 36 percent, when asked which candidate they would trust to handle international affairs. Obama held a stronger advantage over Romney on foreign policy than on any issue relating directly to the economy, the pollsters found.
“The charge that a president who travels abroad is somehow seen as being insensitive to domestic economic concerns is overblown,” Aronson said. “Clearly, they’re sensitive to that [but] I actually think the politicians are wrong about this. … Americans want the president to play that role.”
Obama’s team is playing up the importance of the travel and the direct connection to domestic issues.
“I think we made the case at a number of our foreign trips recently that the economic future of the United States is very much tied to our ability to export to new markets and to deepen our economic relationships around the world. So that was a theme of our trip to the Asia-Pacific region, which is the fastest-growing region in the world,” Rhodes said.
Aronson said Obama’s bigger problem may not be that he’s spending too much time on foreign policy but that some of his election-year overseas trips — like the roughly 48-hour jaunt scheduled this week — are so short, some foreigners may see them as an insult.
“The sort of quickie trips leave a little feeling of ‘Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am, and don’t love ’em in the morning.’ I don’t they’re really the right message you want to send,” Aronson added. “I don’t think he serves himself well in terms of foreign policy by doing that.”
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