A political pattern to stimulus tour

Campaign, Blue States Back to top
By EAMON JAVERS | 6/5/09 4:29 AM EDT


Vice President Joe Biden greets the crowd at the ABB plant in Jefferson City, Mo. Since Obama passed the stimulus, administration officials have mainly traveled to blue states for events to tout the program.
Photo: AP

Since Congress passed President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill in February, administration officials have traveled to at least 66 events across the country to tout the massive spending program or hand out stimulus cash to grateful local officials.

But a POLITICO examination of the travel reveals a distinctly political trend line: Top officials have hosted events predominantly in states that Obama won in 2008.

What’s more, the examination revealed that Obama officials all but avoided Southern states that Obama lost.

It is not unusual for a presidential administration to find ways to reward its supporters through federal largesse, particularly in this case, when the goal of the stimulus program is push money out the door to states and localities that can spend it quickly to jump-start the economy. The Bush administration was criticized in 2004 for sending Cabinet officials on trips that critics said doubled as campaigning for the president’s reelection bid.

But the numbers tell the tale: 52 of the 66 events were in states that backed Obama. And taken together, the itineraries amount to a veritable map of Obama’s election-night victories — big-money states like California and New York, swing states like Ohio and Colorado that Obama turned blue and other solidly Democratic states Obama kept in his column.

The events were weighted to big cities that provided Obama some of his biggest election-night margins: Cleveland, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Of the other 14 events, Vice President Joe Biden and Cabinet officials often touched down in places where Obama lost narrowly and that Democrats hope to pull into their column by 2012, such as Missouri, Arizona, Montana and North Dakota.

Only two Southern states were visited by Cabinet officials for stimulus-related trips: Georgia and Kentucky, according to information provided by the White House and an examination of news releases from all 21 Cabinet-level agencies.

White House officials noted that stimulus spending is going to all 50 states based on a proportional formula. Biden holds weekly conference calls about stimulus projects with officials from all over the country, including Democrats and Republicans. As of May 28, those calls had included 46 governors, 51 mayors and 15 county executives, including officials from both parties.

And the White House sharply denied that there was any political motivation to the travel. “Politics plays no role in implementation of the Recovery Act or highlighting its successes. Period,â€