Obama to rebut Trump in Indiana

President Obama will intensify his case against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday, casting the 2016 election as a choice between the Democrats’s and the GOP’s divergent paths on the economy. 

{mosads}“If what you really care about in this election is your pocketbook, if what you’re concerned about is who will look out for the interests of working people and grow the middle class, then the debate isn’t even close,” he will say during a speech in Elkhart, Ind., according to excerpts of his prepared remarks.

Obama is traveling again to the northern Indiana city, the site of his first-ever presidential visit, to extol it as a symbol of the economic recovery take took place under his watch. 

The White House touted the city’s 4.1 percent unemployment rate — down from 19.6 percent at its peak in 2009 — and other positive indicators to show Obama’s policies worked to pull the economy out of the Great Recession. 

But Republicans note that Elkhart’s recovery, like the rest of the nation’s, has been uneven. The city’s jobs are tied to the boom-and-bust recreational vehicle industry, which has seen a recent upswing. 

The president has held a series of official White House events like this one, which have touched on important themes for the 2016 presidential campaign. 

But Obama has yet to officially hit the campaign trail, as the Democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders drags on. The president did not mention Trump by name in the excerpts released by the White House Wednesday.

His Indiana stop comes just weeks before both parties hold their conventions to officially kick off the general election season. It also comes weeks after Trump dominated the state’s open GOP primary, cementing his status as the party’s standard-bearer.

The president is offering a contrast to Trump, who has ripped the president’s economic policies for shipping manufacturing jobs overseas, including thousands from the Hoosier State.

He’s railed against Obama’s signature Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, claiming it will bring more of the same.

Obama will argue Wednesday that his policies — such as the 2009 stimulus law, which funded clean-energy jobs and infrastructure projects, and the auto bailout — saved the country from economic abyss. He said the next president should take a similar approach.

“If we get cynical and just vote our fears, or don’t vote at all, we won’t build on the progress we’ve started,” the president will say. “We’ve got to come together around our common values, our faith in hard work and opportunity for everyone.”

Obama has often expressed exasperation for not receiving more public credit as the economy has improved, a phenomenon which could hurt Democratic chances in November. 

Republicans argue that the economy rebounded in places such as Indiana despite Obama’s economic initiatives, not because of them. 

“I believe the people of Elkhart and my fellow Hoosiers have brought our economy back in spite of the burdens that higher taxes, mandates and increasing regulations from Washington, D.C. have placed on them.” Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) wrote in an op-ed Wednesday.

Just 42 percent of adults described the economy as good in a May Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, even though two-thirds of people said their own household was doing well. 

But the president is hoping to leverage his high approval ratings to help Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, and down-ballot candidates in the fall. 

Clinton has embraced Obama and his policies on the campaign trail as she seeks to turn out the coalition that elected him president twice. But she’s also distanced herself from him on certain key issues, including trade. 

— Updated 1:29 p.m.