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Obama Seeks Support From Labor for Health Overhaul

PITTSBURGH -- President Barack Obama swept into union country to rally organized labor behind his push to overhaul the health-care system, with campaign-style speeches in Ohio and at an AFL-CIO convention here urging workers to get behind him.

Saying the health issue has been talked "to death," he asked union leaders here, "How much longer are we going to have to wait? It can't wait," to loud cheers and chants of "We can't wait."

In Lordstown, Ohio, he told General Motors Co. workers, "As long as you've got an ounce of fight in you, I've got a ton of fight in me. I've said it before: I'm skinny, but I'm tough."

After a summer that featured a bruising debate over the overhaul, the president shed some of his nonchalance about the opposition to his policies and proposals. He made a nod to "a lot of stuff" supporters have been hearing "from folks who are not that friendly to me."

The day's audiences were a respite from those critics. Outgoing AFL-CIO President John Sweeney hailed Mr. Obama's decision Friday night to impose stiff tariffs on Chinese car and light-truck tires. That decision has angered some conservatives and raised the specter of a trade war with the nation that Mr. Obama is counting on to finance a record budget deficit and help pressure Iran and North Korea to give up their nuclear programs.

But it was popular in a region battered by foreign competition and manufacturing imports. Jon Carmichael, 30 years old, of Cortland, Ohio, said he encouraged the president to use tariffs more widely to protect U.S. manufacturers during a closed-door roundtable Mr. Obama held with a dozen GM workers before his speech. Mr. Obama was noncommittal, saying he could only do so much under the rules of the World Trade Organization. Instead, he told the group, he needed to focus on prying foreign markets open to U.S. products.

The president's visit to the sprawling Lordstown GM plant marked the first meeting with GM workers since his administration effectively took over the company.

In a rousing address, Mr. Obama hailed the return of 150 workers here Monday, and the pending return of more than 1,000 more in the next three weeks as the plant gears up to build more Chevrolet Cobalts. Inventories of the small cars were depleted by the "cash for clunkers" program, and the Lordstown plant is preparing to launch the Chevy Cruze, a small, high-mileage car next year -- just the sort of vehicle the Obama administration has hoped GM would embrace.

Mr. Obama said he hadn't run for president to run a car company. "It wasn't on my to-do list. It wasn't even something on my want-to-do list."

But, he said, "for me to just let the auto industry collapse, to vanish, would have done unbelievable damage."

The workers here showed gratitude to Mr. Obama, who took a significant political hit for his GM intervention. Lines of diminutive Cobalts formed the backdrop for Mr. Obama's speech, a marked contrast to the Firebirds, Cavaliers and Chevy vans the plant used to produce. And Mr. Obama made it clear he did want something from them: their vocal support for his agenda, especially his push to overhaul the U.S. health-care system.

At the AFL-CIO convention, Mr. Sweeney promised, "We in this room are the wind at his back."

But opposition remained a presence. In a conference call organized by the Republican National Committee, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said the president's plan to cap greenhouse-gas emissions would be "devastating" to western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio steel and coal country. And the resurgent medical industry of Pittsburgh would "suffer greatly from the Obama socialized medicine proposal."

"He's coming to sell a message that I think won't resonate," Mr. Santorum said.

Mr. Obama framed the struggles of the labor movement as the struggle to maintain a prosperous middle class and an egalitarian society.

"The fundamental test of our time is whether we will heed this lesson, whether we will let America become a nation of the very rich and the very poor, of the haves and the have-nots," he said here, "or whether we will remain true to the promise of this country and build a future where the success of all of us is built on the success of each of us."

The working-class, mainly white auto workers in around Lordstown and Pittsburgh are precisely the kind of voters Mr. Obama has had a tough time with. Hillary Clinton ran well in this region in her wins over Mr. Obama in the Ohio and Pennsylvania Democratic primaries, and he is still struggling with the demographic.

But a dozen workers who sat down with the president before his speech were positive. Jay Tomasic, 31, of Berlin Center, Ohio, dismissed the opposition to Mr. Obama's economic agenda. "Any time you change things, you have people opposed to change," he said.

But Mr. Tomasic is not so sure Mr. Obama's plans for GM -- or the turnaround he hailed at Lordstown -- will take. In the wake of the GM shake-up, three shifts at the plant were cut. Auto-parts maker Delphi Corp. slashed jobs here as well. The cash-for-clunkers rebound is cause for some hope, Mr. Tomasic said. But, he added, "the jury's still out."

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