Obama draws on election strategy to sell plans

FACED with fading support for his health-care reforms, the US President, Barack Obama, has returned to the strategy that won him the presidency, presenting a big-picture vision of the future that his plans in health, education and the economy would bolster.

"History should be our guide," he said in a speech on Wednesday that resonated with the emotional flourishes of the election campaign. The United States led the world's economies in the 20th century because we led the world in innovation. Today the competition is keener; the challenge is tougher; and that's why innovation is more important than ever."

Mr Obama chose the town of Elkhart, Indiana, mobile home capital of America as the venue for his return to form. Sales of motorised mobile homes, which often cost more than $US100,000 ($119,000) have been ravaged first by high petrol prices and then by the economy.

Elkhart has had one of the steepest rises in unemployment in the country, the jobless rate rising 10 percentage points in a year to 17 per cent.

The battle for America's future "will be won by making places like Elkhart what they once were and can be again - and that's centres of innovation and entrepreneurship and ingenuity and opportunity; the bustling, whirring, humming engines of American prosperity," Mr Obama said.

Instead of becoming bogged down in the health hpolicy detail as he has recently, he chose a much bigger canvas, to explain how these changes were central to retooling the US economy.

Mr Obama also launched a rare personal appeal via the internet to his support network, Organising for America, urging supporters to go door to door during recess of Congress this month to shore up support for a universal health care option.

"We didn't win last year's election together at a committee hearing in DC," he said. "We won it on the doorsteps and the phone lines, at the softball games and the town meetings, and in every part of this great country where people gather to talk about what matters most."

Democrats returning to their electorates are finding town hall meetings on health care issues are becoming chaotic, with shouting and angry exchanges.

A White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, has accused the Republican Party and interests opposing health care of orchestrating the protests. He called it "manufactured anger".

The liberal blog The Progress Report termed it "swift boating" - a reference to a smear campaign against the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 - and said right-wing groups were behind it.

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