Obama seeks to draw attention to manufacturing
PITTSBURGH — Surrounded by an array of gadgets and high tech equipment, President Obama pledged to boost American manufacturing and to give entrepreneurs greater access to production tools that would help bring their ideas to fruition.
Obama visited this venerable steel manufacturing city to showcase a workshop chain called TechShop, a variation on a tool lending library that provides high-end instruments to hobbyists, tinkerers and start-up businesses to help them realize their innovations. The tour was designed to draw attention to Obama’s own plan to make more government technology and assets available to the private sector.
“I can’t rent the space shuttle out to you,” he joked. “But there are areas where we can in fact enhance what is already being done by companies like TechShop.”
To maintain the U.S. edge in innovation, Obama said, “we’ve got to have basic research, we’ve got to have skills like math and science and engineering that that are developed, we also have to provide platforms for people who have these ideas to go out there and actually make stuff.”
From Pittsburgh, Obama was flying to New York City for a gala lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee. The fundraiser comes a day after the White House announced plans for Obama to sign an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The trip combines important election-year tasks for Obama — maintaining a focus on the economy, raising money and nurturing an important Democratic voting and donor bloc.
The Pittsburgh visit is part of Obama’s renewed emphasis on how to create jobs and improve wages. Dur- ing the next several weeks Obama is looking to cut through the current foreign policy flare-ups with an emphasis on working families, manufacturing, wages and the need for greater spending on infrastructure projects.
That attention could be crucial in an election year when some Democrats in vulnerable races are not embracing other top Obama issues like climate change and health care.
Also Tuesday, the White House announced that the administration was giving entrepreneurs easier access to high-tech equipment at more than 700 research and development facilities, such as NASA’s National Center for Advanced Manufacturing in New Orleans and the Energy Department’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. In addition, five federal agencies will spend more than $150 million in research to support the Material Genome Initiative, a government and private-sector partnership designed to speed up the development of innovative materials.