This pretty dope to bad i wont be there but its all to the good what if Obama went by Rudys to get a 2 piece while he's here.
President Barack Obama visits Dallas on Tuesday to attend two private fundraisers and to speak at Eastfield College in Mesquite about the jobs bill he recently sent to Congress
WASHINGTON — Barack Obama’s visit to Rick Perry’s turf Tuesday comes as both are struggling.
While the governor is trying to regain his footing in the race for the GOP nomination, the incumbent is saddled with a sluggish economy and approval ratings stuck in the cellar.
Obama will use the Dallas visit to raise cash for the re-election slog he faces over the next 13 months and to stump for a $450 billion jobs plan that Republicans dismiss as another misguided round of stimulus.
Whether he attacks Perry directly, the visit offers Obama a chance to contrast his views with those of a nemesis pitching himself as the best antidote to everything Obama stands for.
“There is going to be a contest of values and vision in 2012,” Obama told ABC News/Yahoo on Monday. “There are going to be some folks who make the argument that if you just slash spending, eliminate regulations that prevent us from polluting our air or polluting our water or we bust labor unions, that that in and of itself is going to restore the American dream. I don’t think most Americans believe that.”
Perry won’t be anywhere in sight for Obama’s visit to Dallas and Mesquite — his sixth visit to Texas as president and his second to Dallas. The governor will be in California on a two-day fundraising swing. But, Perry said the other day in New Hampshire, “we’ll be welcoming him.”
Cruz questions plans
A Perry ally, Ted Cruz, said Obama would do better to use the trip as a fact-finding tour than to pitch his jobs plan.
“Instead of coming for political purposes, he ought to be coming to ask why Texas has created more jobs than 49 other states,” said Cruz, a tea party-backed U.S. Senate candidate and the state’s former chief appellate lawyer under Perry.
Cruz noted that Obama isn’t coming to Texas because he can win here. Obama lost Texas by 1 million votes and 11 percentage points in 2008.
He has done far better in fundraising. In 2008, he raised nearly $16 million from Texas donors, including $4.2 million in Dallas. That was only slightly behind GOP nominee John McCain statewide.
Of course, those figures pale beside Perry’s haul in gubernatorial contests, under state rules that allow unlimited individual donations.
White House spokesman Jay Carney played down the political subtext of the Dallas visit.
“It’s a big country with a lot of states,” he said.
The president’s schedule puts him in Dallas for less than five hours.
He will attend two fundraising luncheons at the Sheraton Hotel downtown. A party official said 400 people are expected at one event, and 30 are expected at the other. Tickets start at $500, with couples paying $2,500 and up. The official declined to say how much the events will raise for the campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
After that, Obama will pitch the jobs plan he unveiled last month to Congress, in front of a crowd of about 1,500 at Eastfield College in Mesquite.
At Eastfield, Obama will tour the campus’ Children’s Laboratory School. To underscore that his jobs bill would provide funds to avert 280,000 teacher layoffs — and to let states hire back tens of thousands of teachers who’ve been hit by budget cuts — Obama will be introduced by Kimberly Russell, a former Dallas school district social studies teacher and single mother who was laid off in May.
Eastfield is in the congressional district represented by Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the fourth-ranked House GOP leader and co-chairman of the “supercommittee” tasked with lopping $1.5 trillion from the deficit by Thanksgiving.
Obama has appeared in recent weeks in the backyards of the House speaker and majority leader and the Senate Republican leader. So the choice of Eastfield, of all the campuses in the area, is probably no accident.
Adding even more intrigue to the selection, 544 out of about 14,000 Eastfield students are illegal immigrants who receive discounted in-state tuition under a law Perry signed in 2001, state records show.
“Governor Perry is taking a bad rap, unfortunately for him,” said the college district’s chancellor, Wright Lassiter, noting that the district began accepting noncitizens several years before Texas enacted the law that Perry’s GOP rivals have been hammering him about. “We should give them an opportunity to better themselves,” though Perry, he said, could have made the case for the law better.
Critics to stay away
Obama critics say they’ll be steering clear.
Katrina Pierson, a tea party leader based in Dallas, said activists mulled how to respond to the visit and decided to ignore it, since there’s no way to dissuade him or his supporters that their premise — that government can create jobs — is wrong.
“He’s just really not worth expending the energy,” she said. “I’d like to tell you we have a counter-rally planned, but we just don’t care.”
There’s little doubt that Perry is on Obama’s radar, though.
“Has anybody been watching the debates lately?” the president told donors last week in San Jose, Calif., riffing on ways he finds the modern Republican Party puzzling. “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.”
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, whose department Perry would like to eliminate, asserted in August that Texas schools have “really struggled” under the governor, citing low high school graduation rates and funding cuts.
Some Democrats hope Obama will reprise the attacks during his visit.
Perry has shot back that the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition, which has parceled out hundreds of millions to states to encourage innovative ways to improve schools, represents an overbearing federal approach that tramples on state and local rights.
Whatever political hay Obama tries to make of such issues, Lassiter said he’s pleased that Eastfield will be used to showcase the benefits of the jobs plan.
“We are the largest community college district in Texas and we think we’re the best. … It sends a tremendous message about the role of community colleges,” he said.
Obama’s jobs bill would provide $5 billion for community college renovations and upgrades. Lassiter expects up to $9 million for the Dallas district, which would help chip away at a $64 million list of deferred projects.
“These, if they are funded, would provide immediate jobs,” Lassiter said.
By TODD J. GILLMAN
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