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The president has been publicly musing about Obama's event ever since it was revealed the ex-president would be hitting campaign trail for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. During a Friday night rally in Georgia, Trump recalled the moment aides told him Obama would be rallying for Biden, much as he did for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

They said, Sir, we have bad news, Trump said recently. Whats the bad news? Obamas going to start campaigning for Sleepy Joe. I said, Is that good or bad? Why is it bad? Because he campaigned harder for Hillary than she did. He was very ineffective as a campaigner. So I think thats good news.

Tuesday night, while Trump avoided an Obama mention, he didnt spare his other enemies during the chilly outdoor rally at the Erie airport. Thousands of supporters bundled up in coats and hats about half wearing masks chanted four more years! as Trump walked onto the stage with Air Force One behind him.

Once Trump took to the podium, he swiftly blasted Bidens son, Hunter, accusing him of earning millions of dollars in China and Ukraine while his father was vice president vague allegations that have not been substantiated with concrete evidence. And when Trumps microphone abruptly cut out, the president quipped that the brief outage was likely caused by "crooked Hillary."

Its no surprise Trump and Obama are both appearing in Pennsylvania. The northeast state has become critical in the race to claim the White House on Nov. 3. In 2016, Trump became the first Republican to win the state since 1988 when turnout was higher than expected. But recent polls show Biden, who spent part of his childhood in the state, could win it back.

If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing, Trump told the crowd Tuesday before mocking Biden for leaving the state and trying to claim Pennsylvania as his own.

It's not his home state. He left you when he was nine, right? I'm not blaming him for that, Trump said. But you know he likes to go, Oh yeah, yeah it's my home state. It's not his home state. I actually went to college in Pennsylvania.

In 2016, some white working class residents who had grown frustrated with the Democratic Party were drawn to Trump by the way he talked about bringing back jobs to the state. But Trumps promises have not necessarily materialized. While the state added manufacturing jobs in 2017 and early 2018, it has been shedding them since October 2018. And with the pandemic-driven economic decline, the state has 600,000 fewer jobs overall than when Trump took office.

Still, Trump aides and allies say they feel confident the president can win the state a second time, even during the coronavirus pandemic, by touting economic policies like tax cuts and trade deals. On Tuesday night, Trump hit those points. He unveiled a video package on a massive screen behind him meant to make the case that Biden would eliminate fracking a method for extracting oil and gas used in Pennsylvania even though Biden has explicitly said he would not take such a step.

Since 2016, Donald Trump has not changed one bit, said former Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.). He is the same person that he was in 2016 when he won Pennsylvania. But the Democrat party has changed since then. Their far shift to the left does not resonate with the Kennedy Democrats that are here in Pennsylvania.

In his wide-ranging speech, Trump touched on a variety of accomplishments and didnt shy away from talking about the coronavirus outbreak, telling the crowd that the country was rounding the corner of the pandemic with a vaccine on its way and that Pennsylvania had been shut down long enough.

You know what we want? Normal life, he said.

National Republicans boast about their presence in Pennsylvania since 2016, contacting more than 11.5 million voters, holding 4,300 training sessions and holding 5,400 MAGA meet-ups with 50,000 attendees. In the last four years, Republicans have registered more than 200,000 more voters, closing the registration gap with Democrats to 700,000, the lowest margin in two decades.

Yet Democrats recently scored a win in the state on voting rules after the Supreme Court decided not to block a Pennsylvania court ruling allowing mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted even if they arrive up to three days later. Mail-in votes are expected to favor Democrats in the state.

And Biden has also traveled to every media market in Pennsylvania, including areas that Trump won by more than 30 points, according to a Biden campaign official.

Our strategy hinges on turning out our base voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, while also building on Democratic gains with key voters like women and seniors, while also shrinking the margins and winning back voters in places Trump won in 2016, the official said.

President Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at North Coast Air aeronautical services at Erie International Airport on Oct. 20, 2020 in Erie, Pa. | Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Separately, Bidens wife, Jill Biden, has visited the Philadelphia suburbs twice in the last month. And Bidens running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, visited Philadelphia last month. The campaign has also focused on reaching labor union members, hiring a labor outreach director to try to reach the 700,000 Pennsylvania union members with literature drops and phone banks, the official said.

Yet with Biden laying low in the run-up to his debate Thursday with Trump, the campaign trail in Pennsylvania is essentially Trump vs. Obama.

Trump likes to say Obama didn't want to endorse Biden because Obama knows hes mentally shot." But while he largely stayed out of the Democratic presidential primary, Obama has vocally endorsed Biden during the general election, urging voters to support Biden because "our democracy" is at stake.

"He made me a better president," Obama said during his speech at the Democratic National Convention. "He's got the character and the experience to make us a better country."

Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat, said Obama will be a crucial surrogate for Biden. Obama, Casey said, can explain how he worked with Biden to restore the economy following the 2008 recession, and show how that work will apply to resurrecting the post-pandemic economy.

No one can validate Joe Bidens experience and his ability to do the job better than Barack Obama can, Casey said in an interview Tuesday.

With Obamas emergence, Trump has stepped up the attacks on his predecessor.

Trump has criticized Obama for joining a nuclear agreement with Iran; for allowing immigrants to cross the southern border illegally; and for entering what he calls unfair trade deals. Hes also made more personal comments accusing Obama of undeservedly winning a Nobel Peace Prize. (Trump has long mused that he should win the award.)

And Trump often cites a Gallup poll from this month showing 56 percent of Americans saying they are better off today than they were four years ago, when Obama and Biden were in charge of the country.

Last month, a crowd at Trump's rally in Nevada even chanted "lock him up" after the president baselessly accused Obama of "spying" on the 2016 Trump campaign a riff on the 2016 Trump rally chant aimed at Clinton.

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Trump, in Pennsylvania, faces an old foe: Obama - POLITICO

So far, former President Barack Obama has mostly stayed away from the presidential campaign this year. Alyssa Pointer/AP hide caption

So far, former President Barack Obama has mostly stayed away from the presidential campaign this year.

Former President Barack Obama will hit the campaign trail for his former vice president, Joe Biden, in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

Obama's first announced stop will be next Wednesday in Philadelphia. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and the fact the Biden campaign has prioritized safety and avoided large gatherings, assures the scene will look much different from the last time Obama held a presidential campaign rally in the city. On the final day before the 2016 election, he and Michelle Obama campaigned alongside Bill and Hillary Clinton in front of thousands of supporters packed onto Independence Mall.

While the Biden campaign has not yet announced the details of Obama's speech, odds are it will look much more like a more recent Philadelphia appearance: Obama's searing anti-Trump speech, delivered from an empty room at the Museum of the American Revolution during the Democratic National Convention.

Obama has stayed away from the presidential campaign for large stretches this year. He was finishing up his presidential memoir, which will be released next month, and also was giving Biden and other Democrats space to make their own arguments about the 2020 election.

Still, Obama has made headlines when he has engaged in the race. His convention speech marked an unprecedented move for a former president: a blistering warning about President Trump, not only as a failure as commander in chief, but also as a threat to democracy itself.

"Donald Trump hasn't grown into the job because he can't," Obama said in August. "And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before."

Obama also attacked efforts to undermine voting rights and the credibility of the upcoming election when he delivered Congressman John Lewis' eulogy at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in July. He has recorded videos with Biden and raised nearly $8 million in a joint virtual fundraiser with his onetime running mate earlier this year.

During that June fundraiser, Obama repeated a message he has delivered to younger Democrats over and over again this year in online videos, graduation speeches and other mediums: He urged them to do everything they can to organize and participate in the election. "Man, this is serious business," Obama said at the time. "Whatever you've done so far is not enough."

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Barack Obama Will Hit The Campaign Trail In Presidential Race's Final Days - NPR

The person taking the oath of office on Jan. 20 will face an economic mess.

That will be true whether its Joe Biden or Donald J. Trump, and true whether or not the off-and-on negotiations over a new round of pandemic relief yield anything.

Given mass failures of small businesses and continuing astronomical numbers of people filing for jobless benefits, the president will face a situation uncannily similar to the crisis Mr. Biden and President Obama faced a dozen years earlier. If it is Mr. Biden who comes to power, along with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, he will have something rare: the chance to look at the lessons of recent history and have a do-over.

Mr. Obamas first legislative priority, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, shows what can go wrong when the government spends money on a mass scale to fix an economic crisis. Mainstream economists judge that the legislation helped stabilize financial markets and start an economic expansion that would last a decade. But it also proved underpowered and politically toxic, with lasting consequences for Mr. Obamas presidency.

It offered fuel for the presidents enemies to portray him as a profligate deficit spender. Yet it was also insufficient to generate a robust recovery; the unemployment rate the month of the 2010 midterm elections was 9.8 percent, nearly as high as it had been a year earlier. That combination of a weak recovery with the perception of wasteful spending helped Republicans retake the House of Representatives.

Most voters never agreed with the view of economists that the recession would have been worse if not for the stimulus bill. In 2010, for example, only 35 percent of Americans in a Pew survey believed that the legislation had helped keep unemployment from getting worse. By contrast, 80 percent of economists surveyed in 2012 said the legislation had resulted in a lower jobless rate that year.

The lesson: If you are going to shoot your shot at fixing the economy, you had best go big enough to not merely stop it from collapsing, but also to get a boom underway. Failure will doom an administration to unpopularity and stymie a broader agenda.

The same economic challenges will apply if Mr. Trump is re-elected, though the likely policy approach would be different. In negotiations over pandemic relief spending, the administration has embraced help for businesses, including protecting them from virus-related legal liability. And many Republican senators have opposed a new large-scale stimulus, despite occasional tweets from the president advocating it. His allies have argued that the administrations strategy of deregulation and low taxes will create a robust recovery as public health concerns ebb.

Jon Lieber, an analyst who tracks American politics for Eurasia Group, projects that a Trump victory and Republican retention of Senate control would result in pandemic-related stimulus of around $600 billion. Democrats are looking at much more, with Mr. Lieber projecting $2.5 trillion to $3.5 trillion in the event of a Biden victory and a Democratic retaking of the Senate.

The scale of that possible fiscal action reflects a consensus among liberal-leaning economists including those advising Mr. Biden: that the risk of doing too little to get the economy back on a path to prosperity is greater than the potential downside of doing too much.

We have much better tools for tamping down growth that is too fast than we have the tools to boost an economy thats too weak, said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution and a former chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office. Once our economy gets into a slow-growth, grinding scenario, it is very difficult to change that course.

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At the same time, a sharp drop in interest rates even as budget deficits have risen has led many centrist and left-leaning economists to worry less about debt than they did in the Obama years. And Republican support for a $1.5 trillion tax cut in 2017 and a $2.2 trillion pandemic relief bill this past spring has helped reduce sticker shock over 13-figure cost estimates.

Ms. Edelberg published a paper with Louise Sheiner this month estimating that $2 trillion in fiscal stimulus would bring the economy back to its pre-pandemic growth path by the third quarter of 2021. In the absence of any action, they estimate, it could take as long as a decade.

Mr. Biden has cited his work on the 2009 stimulus bill, boasting of his work to prevent fraud and of the role the recovery act played in supporting state and local governments and clean energy. In discussing his 2021 agenda, he has promised the kinds of investment that will stimulate the economy and to get back to full employment fast and help build back better than before.

Those who advise him say he is aware of the historical echoes.

Joe Biden doesnt want to come into office and sit on a sloggy economy for four, six, eight quarters, said Jared Bernstein, who advised Mr. Biden during his vice presidency and does so now. If he gets the chance, I suspect there will be real motivation to do this deeply, effectively and quickly.

In particular, Mr. Bernstein said, a Biden administration would seek high-multiplier policies that funnel money to people and businesses that need it and are likely to spend it, helping funds circulate through the economy quickly to fuel growth.

The Obama administrations miscalculations were both political and economic. The economy was in such free fall over the winter of 2008-9 that estimates of the shortfall in economic activity that fiscal stimulus might seek to replace were constantly behind the curve. A deeply unpopular bank bailout, passed by the Bush administration but implemented by the Obama team, fueled outrage, and many voters conflated the two. Political advisers in the White House believed that if they sought more than $1 trillion in fiscal aid, the political backlash would be so severe as to risk getting nothing.

Both political and economic aides misunderstood some of the ways politics and economics could intersect in a severe recession like that one.

Oct. 21, 2020, 12:58 a.m. ET

We absolutely thought that Congress would want to do multiple high-profile rounds of stimulus if the economy was worse than expected, said Jason Furman, an Obama economic adviser who is now a Harvard professor. We thought Congress running for re-election in 2010 would want to be seen doing something to help the economy so they could campaign on it. We didnt realize how unpopular it was going to be by then.

Details of a Biden stimulus would depend on what, if any, fiscal action is enacted before January; how the economy evolves between now and then; and the size of any Senate majority Democrats might obtain. Mr. Biden has emphasized relief efforts that would include significant help for green energy, low-income households, and state and local governments. It would probably be similar to the $3 trillion pandemic relief legislation that House Democrats passed in the spring, Biden allies and outside analysts said.

A crucial question for any Biden stimulus would be how Democrats approach legislative strategy in the Senate.

In 2009, the Obama administration secured a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate needed to overcome a Republican filibuster by winning over three Republicans. But that would be an unappealing pathway should Mr. Biden find himself in a similar spot in early 2021.

Even if Democrats were to win the Senate, it would probably be a narrow majority, meaning more Republicans would be needed to get to 60 yes votes for stimulus. There are also fewer centrist Republicans today whose votes are likely to be available in 2021.

And the history of 2009 applies. Negotiations with Republicans led to a smaller bill and one with more components that Mr. Obamas aides viewed as ineffective. The three Republican votes, in other words, displayed little bipartisanship, and diluted the bills economic impact.

In 2021, a Democratic Senate would have two options to go it alone. It could use reconciliation, a budget process that allows tax and spending legislation to be enacted with a simple majority vote. But this would put strict limits on what the bill could do, ruling out many regulatory or other provisions that the Senate parliamentarian might declare ineligible.

Then there is the option of eliminating the 60-vote filibuster rule, which would open the door for more expansive policymaking on all fronts, but could prove politically unpopular and would have far-reaching consequences for how Congress works.

Thats unlikely to happen right away, said Mr. Lieber, the Eurasia Group analyst and a former adviser to Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader: They need to set up the political argument first that, We tried working with Republicans on the puppy dogs and grandmas act and they filibustered it, and then the ice-cream-for-everyone act and they filibustered that.

A central tension for Democrats would be between a focus on policies that get money out the door quickly and can seed a speedy economic rebound, versus those that take place more slowly but can create more lasting change.

To many in the Biden orbit who lived through the toxic politics of the 2009 stimulus, the urgency of doing more than papering over a rough patch in the economy is a particularly vivid lesson.

There was a mantra in 2009 of stimulus being timely, targeted and temporary, said Heather Boushey, president of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. That seemed right for the problem we were solving then. This problem feels different because its unearthed these really important structural challenges that need to be solved.

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How Failures of the Obama-Era Stimulus Could Guide a Biden Administration - The New York Times

A Los Angeles Lakers player has gone on record to state that former President Barack Obama was the reason that the NBA players decided to resume the basketball season, according to Insider. The completion of the season was in jeopardy after some of the players didnt want to play after Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officers shot an unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake.

The players had unofficially decided to protest on Aug. 26, when the Milwaukee Bucks took a stance and didnt take the court, during the first round of the NBA playoffs against the Orlando Magic. After making that unprecedented move, the remaining playoff teams followed suit and the NBA decided to suspend the playoffs.

On that night, the players and coaches decided to meet to vote on what would be the next move. Both LA teams, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers had voted to end the season and vacate the bubble. The vote had starkly divided the players and placed the season in jeopardy.

Los Angeles Lakers forward Jared Dudley, while appearing on The Bill Simmons Podcast, had concluded that the season was most likely over. But then, President Obama had spoken to some of the players on the phone and that conversation solidified that they would continue playing.

I think Obamas phone call to Chris Paul, [Andre] Iguodala, and LeBron [James] to seal the deal of how he would handle it, getting a leadership group together, how we were going to attack the owners. And then once we put that to bed, it was time, after talking to Bron after he talked to Obama, it was like, If Obama said it, what other better advice can we get? Dudley said.

I said, Theres nothing else to talk about. Were playing.'

It was reported that Obama had encouraged the players to use the moment to come up with actionable items to help fight racial inequality, social injustice, and police brutality.

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LA Lakers' Jared Dudley Says Obama's Phone Conversation With NBA Players Was the Catalyst to Resume Playoffs - Black Enterprise

Donald Trumps most often repeated claim in his reelection campaign is that hes been a great job creator. To hear him talk, youd think that job creation skyrocketed after he became president.

But data from the Department of Labor tells quite a different story. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the best three-year span of job creation in this century was 2014, 2015 and 2016. That was while Barack Obama, not Trump, was president. During those three years, the economy added 8.07 million jobs.

By contrast, during Trumps first three years as president (2017, 2018 and 2019), the economy only added 6.5 million jobs. Thats right, job creation slowed down after Trump became president and has never reached the level it was at during Obamas presidency.

The facts show that it was Obama and not Trump who turned our economy around and gave us low unemployment, high job creation, a record-setting stock market and a shrinking budget deficit. Although Trump tried to take credit for Obamas economy, were now seeing the results of the Trump presidency on our economy.

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Letter: Obama's economy | Letters to the Editor | qconline.com - Quad-Cities Online