He keeps coming back, as if magnetically drawn to some ore of truth here.
For the fourth time in 15 months, President Barack Obama will visit this blue-collar manufacturing area to sample the mood of the heartland and bring a message of change. He returns Wednesday to a community that has been hit as hard as any in this recession.
“Each time he comes here, I keep thinking things must get better,” said Rosalie Collins, 43, an unemployed RV worker, as she waited in line at an unemployment office this week.
Elkhart encapsulates a key part of the country’s industrial downturn. Unlike the great Midwestern auto towns that are locked with a single industry, the region occupies a slice of industrial America that encompasses small and large manufacturers that traverse a range of businesses — from makers of musical instruments to high-tech engines.
It is a place that Obama has also found attractive. This stretch of northern Indiana has become, in many ways, the poster child of the president’s stimulus plans and promises of recovery.
Salvation won’t come soon enough for the nearly 36,000 people in a county of less than 200,000 who don’t have a job. More than a dozen factories have shut down in the past 12 months.
“We’ve all been scraping the bottom and there’s not much left to scrape,” said Loren Begly Sr., 78, a retired truck driver whose six children have all had trouble either finding or keeping full-time work.
No one here could have imagined such hardship was coming when Sen. Barack Obama first stopped here in May 2008 in his campaign for the presidency.
It was days before the state’s primary, and Obama arrived for a get-out-the-vote event and talked to residents about the war in Iraq, his “funny” name — and jobs.
Collins barely paid attention to the news of the campaign stop. She felt secure in her job installing seats into RVs. The unemployment rate was 6 percent.
When Obama returned in August, he was ahead in the polls, but Collins was nervous. Area factories were shedding jobs.
When Obama came for a third stop in February, he came as a president trying to put a human face on why the country needed to support his $787 billion stimulus package.
Collins had lost her job by then and was scared. Unemployment in the city of Elkhart had skyrocketed to 18 percent.
Now there are hints of recovery. Seven area manufacturing firms, ranging from auto insulation parts and an office chair maker to RV manufacturers, have announced plans to expand their operations.
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phuffstutter2@tribune.com
