Obama Launches Debt Plan Tour

Bloomberg reports:

President Barack Obama begins a tour promoting his proposal to cut long-term budget deficits with a new urgency after Standard & Poor’s warned that the nation’s AAA credit rating is in peril.

While the trip that begins today with a town-hall meeting in Virginia is partly billed as an effort to gain support for cuts in popular programs, Obama administration officials said they don’t expect him to refer to the S&P report unless he is asked.

Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist who worked on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, said any president would prefer to minimize attention to an unfavorable assessment of the nation’s creditworthiness.

Local newspapers and television stations would be likely to report “‘Wall Street questions U.S. long-term credit because of political paralysis in Washington,’” Lehane said. “That’s not the headline you want when you’re looking at re-election.”

Obama is scheduled to spend three days traveling through states crucial to his 2012 re-election campaign to publicize his plan to reduce cumulative deficits by $4 trillion over 12 years. The plan includes spending cuts on defense and domestic programs and calls for raising taxes on the wealthy.

He will hold town-hall meetings at 10:15 a.m. today in Annandale, Virginia, and later in the week at Facebook Inc.’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and in Reno, Nevada.

On the eve of the tour, Obama underlined his commitment to reducing the deficit in a series of interviews with local television anchors in swing states.

“We’ve got to make sure we’re living within our means,” Obama told a Raleigh, North Carolina, television station.