Obama helps raise funds but is rarity at public events

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has hardly avoided the campaign trail this year, appearing across the country to raise money for candidates and urge supporters to get out to the polls in November.

But his appearance at a public rally just outside Washington, D.C., on Thursday was unique in this regard: The candidate invited him to be there.

Obama came to Bowie, Md., to support the re-election campaign of Gov. Martin O’Malley, saying he “made tough choices in tough times to move Maryland forward.” The last time Obama appeared at a public event at the invitation of a fellow Democrat was in January, when he sought to boost Martha Coakley’s flagging and ultimately unsuccessful campaign for Edward M. Kennedy’s former Senate seat.

For O’Malley, the decision to bring Obama in was a no-brainer; a recent Washington Post poll pegged the president’s job approval rating at over 60 percent. But with Obama’s job rating slipping in many key states, other Democrats have been more reluctant to appear with their party’s leader.

They have welcomed his financial drawing power, however. Through September, the president has headlined nearly 50 fundraisers this year, according to CBS’ Mark Knoller, unofficial statistician of the White House press corps.

After the Maryland rally, the president was scheduled to travel home to Chicago for a series of fundraisers benefitting local Democratic candidates, especially Senate hopeful Alexi Giannoulias.

That’s not to say Obama’s presence isn’t being used by other candidates: Republicans love to feature him in their campaign ads. In Kentucky, Senate candidate Rand Paul even employs an Obama impersonator in a new television spot, to say that Democrat Jack Conway “supported me for president, helped bankroll my campaign, and even fought to pass my health care plan.”

Perhaps no candidate is more wary of being linked to Obama than West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, who is running in a special election to complete the late Robert Byrd’s Senate term. Manchin’s approval ratings are among the best of any governor in the nation – 66 percent, according to a Fox News poll released this week.

But Republican John Raese took to the airwaves almost as soon as Manchin announced his candidacy to tell state voters that he would be “Obama’s rubber stamp” in Washington. The argument could be lethal, given that the Fox News poll showed the president’s approval rating at an anemic 29 percent.

Manchin himself told a television interviewer Thursday that West Virginians are upset that Obama and others in Washington “overreached.”

“The president’s not running for the U.S. Senate in West Virginia. I am,” Manchin said.

Of particular concern to Democrats is the fact that Obama’s job numbers are perilously low in other key states with tough Senate races. In Missouri, a CNN poll put Obama’s approval at 35 percent; in Nevada, 39 percent.

In Pennsylvania, where Obama will hold a major rally organized through the Democratic National Committee on Sunday, his approval ratings hover around 40 percent.

David Plouffe, who ran Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and now advises the national party on political strategy, countered that the president has been an asset by shaping the message nationwide for Democrats, framing the coming election as a choice between those who would move the country forward and Republicans who would return to policies that brought about the current economic crisis.

More helpful to Democrats, he added, are efforts to boost turnout among those so-called “surge” voters, who supported Obama in 2008 but have voted only sporadically, if at all, before.