President Barack Obama speaks in Elkhart, Ind., on June 1. | AP Photo Obama stages Republican voter intervention Returning to the scene of his first trip as president, Obama says GOP voters are betting against the economy.

President Barack Obama’s message in the heartland on Wednesday recalled the simplicity of the original Clinton campaign: If you’re voting on the economy, it’s stupid to vote for a Republican.

“When I hear working families thinking about voting for those plans, then I want to have an intervention,” Obama said in Elkhart, Indiana, after casting GOP proposals as myth-based, cynical and, at one point, “crazy.”


Obama traveled back to the town that hosted his first domestic visit as president to deliver a sweeping contrast between Republicans’ and Democrats’ — specifically his own — vision for the economy. He did not endorse either of the candidates running to succeed him, though he did lay out his own proposals for addressing some of the lingering areas “where folks have good reason to feel anxious,” including slow wage growth and reducing inequality.

Elkhart is richly symbolic for this president. He campaigned there and when he visited as president in February 2009, the unemployment rate was pushing 20 percent — about double the already high national average. Obama argued that the stimulus package and the auto bailout are why Elkhart’s unemployment rate is now at 4 percent — lower than the 5 percent nationwide. High school graduation rates in Elkhart are up, according to the White House, while underwater mortgages around Indiana and the nation are down.

As Obama noted, it hasn’t helped him politically in the predominantly white town of around 50,000.

“I definitely got whupped here in 2012. I know I don’t poll all that well in this county,” Obama said. “I came here precisely because this county votes Republican…. If the economy is really what drives the election, then it’s going to be voters like you that have to decide between two very different visions of what’s going to help strengthen our middle class.”

Indeed, Donald Trump is hoping to make the rest of the Rust Belt look like Elkhart, politically, boasting that he could turn Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin red.

Obama said there are legitimate reasons to vote for Republicans. From gun rights to gay rights, abortion and terrorism, Obama conceded, voters who prioritize those issues “might think we haven’t done the right thing on any of those issues, and that the Republicans have the right answer.”

He continued, “But if what you care about in this election is your pocketbook, if what you’re concerned about is the interests of the working people, of who will grow the middle class… the debate is not even close.

If Elkhart is dominated by Republicans, Concord Community High School’s auditorium was a tent revival for the vocal minority. The audience of 2,075 booed when Obama made a reference to the presumptive Republican nominee — Obama shut them down: “Voting, not booing.”

And they repeatedly called for him to run for a third term. While he joked that neither the Constitution nor Michelle Obama would let him do it, Obama nonetheless laid out, in relatively concrete terms, his proposals for maintaining and expanding his economic record.

They included comprehensive immigration reform, raising the minimum wage, expanding Social Security benefits, giving women equal pay and offering two years of free community college.

Obama rips Trump's vision for America President Barack Obama ripped the Republican agenda onWednesday afternoon as he spoke in Elkhart, Indiana

Despite the policy points, Obama was far from the professorly president delivering a State of the Union address or the scold excoriating Republicans for inaction. He was loose, ad-libbing frequently as he veered into good-natured sarcasm, false incredulity and chipper “myth-busting” of Republican arguments.

It was reminiscent of a nearly four-year-old speech by former President Bill Clinton, when he officially re-nominated Obama at the Democratic National Convention with a rollicking defense of Obama’s economic record, making the case to let him finish what he’d started.

Clinton mocked the Republicans at the time, summarizing their argument thusly: “We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.”

Pundits at the time said Clinton had articulated Obama’s message better than Obama. Now, Obama’s a popular Democratic president who’s not on the ballot, and he is returning the favor. It’s Hillary Clinton who is struggling to distill her own campaign rationale and faces an ongoing, if mathematically improbable, challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders that prevents her from fully drawing a contrast with Trump.

Obama also mocked the Republican narrative as he sees it. “Their basic story is America’s working class, America’s middle class, families like yours, have been victimized by a big bloated federal government run by a bunch of elitists like me” who, he added, are “letting immigrants and foreigners steal whatever jobs Obamacare hasn’t killed yet.”

That story, he added, “is not supported by facts.” But Republicans repeat it, he added, “to get them votes” and in order to “promote specials interests and protect those at the very top of the economic ladder.”

His critique of Republicans – both those in Congress and Trump – was especially pointed with regard to the bank regulations and consumer protections passed in the wake of the crisis.

“The Republican nominee for president has already said he’d dismantle all these rules that we’ve passed. That is crazy,” Obama said. “The notion that you would vote for anybody that would allow them to go back to doing the same stuff that broke our economy’s back makes no sense. I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or an independent — why would you do that?”

Republicans, of course, have a very different understanding of the last eight years.

The citizens of Elkhart and Indiana drove the recovery themselves, “in spite of the burdens that higher taxes, mandates and increasing regulations from Washington, D.C. have placed on them,” wrote Republican Gov. Mike Pence in the Elkhart Truth. “Since I became governor in January 2013, we have worked every day to lower the burden of taxes and regulations so businesses large and small can focus on jobs and growth instead of worrying about the burden of their state government.”

Other critics have also noted that in Elkhart, low gas prices played a big role in the revival of its marquee industry: RV manufacturing.

“Hillary Clinton is running on four more years of Obamanomics, so the president is trying to convince voters his record of weak growth, stagnant wages, and a shrinking middle class is really a success story,” said Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short in a statement. “The fact that there are 264,000 fewer manufacturing jobs today than when President Obama took office more than seven years ago is a stark reminder of the failure of his policies.”

But even as Obama made a forceful argument to embrace the Democratic path forward on the economy and to eschew Republicans’ vision, it’s all three of the remaining presidential candidates who are threatening a major pillar of his economic legacy -- the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

“So when you hear somebody threatening to cut off trade and saying that that’s standing up for American workers, that’s just not true,” Obama said.

Nick Gass contributed to this report.