President Obama hit Cheesehead territory yesterday to rally beleaguered workers and hawk his proposals for the final two years of his first term.
“We’re going to need to go all in. We’re going to need to get serious about winning the future,” he told workers at a power-technology plant in Wisconsin.
Repeating a line from his State of the Union Address the previous night, Obama called Americans to a new “Sputnik moment.”
That was the wake-up call in the 1950s, he said, when the Soviets broke the barrier of space and Americans realized how far behind they were technologically.
Despite calling for a five-year freeze in government spending, Obama wants the United States to pour huge additional amounts of money into science and technology programs to make advancements in renewable energy such as solar and improve competitiveness abroad.
Obama said that while China invested in clean-energy technologies, “we fell down on the job. We weren’t moving as fast as we should have.”
The town of Manitowoc, on the shores of Lake Michigan, was for two reasons a fitting backdrop for Obama’s speech.
One, it’s best known as where a 20-pound chunk of Sputnik, the Soviet satellite, crashed in 1962.
But more important, Wisconsin is sure to be one of the most hotly contested battleground states in 2012 when the president is up for re-election.
Obama won the state in 2008. Since then, Republicans have enjoyed a huge surge of support across Wisconsin.
“Part of what I wanted to communicate last night is, having gone through a tough time, having gone through a recession, having seen so many jobs lost, having seen the financial markets take a swoon . . . you get a sense that a lot of folks feel like we just have to play not to lose,” he said yesterday.
“If we’re on defense and playing not to lose, someone else is going to lap us.”
“The jobs you’re creating here, the growth you’ve achieved, has come, I know, through hard work, ingenuity and a single-minded focus on being the best at what you do,” he told workers at Orion Energy Systems.
But “this plant, this company, has also been supported over the years not only by the Department of Agriculture and the Small Business Administration, but by tax credits and awards we created to give a leg up to renewable-energy companies.”