Can Obama save manufacturing?

As he campaigns for reelection, President Obama has embraced soaring political rhetoric, pledging to harness the ingenuity of America “to bring manufacturing back.” In beat-up factory towns across the land, he has promoted a vision to rebuild manufacturing after decades of shuttered plants and vanishing middle class jobs.

But he wasn’t always so sure. Three years ago, confronting the issue in an Oval Office debate, Obama was less of the chest-thumping politician he is today. Vice President Biden led a group of advisers who were making the case for an ambitious plan to reverse the industry’s long decline.

Obama had witnessed the devastation of lost factory jobs from his earliest days as a community activist in Chicago and felt in his gut that there must be some way to help, but the president, a policy wonk and onetime professor, also wanted to know what the research showed.

“There’s a narrative that countries have to make things to be successful,” Obama said to his economic advisers. “What’s the evidence?”

But he has also listened more closely to his political instincts, rejecting the view of many economists, including several on his team, that manufacturing doesn’t have an especially dynamic role to play in the nation’s economy. People who work closely with him say Obama has followed an impulse that the government must try to protect manufacturing workers — people who make things.

“As the issue has been surfaced,” said Ron Bloom, Obama’s former top manufacturing adviser, “the president’s core values have had a chance to come out and I think you see them now.”

Even so, as happens in any election year, the president’s rhetoric is a step ahead of his policy. He hasn’t declared specific national goals for restoring manufacturing to the place it once was or launched a race-to-the-moon-like government program.

Not that it would be easy. Global, decades-long forces haven take a massive toll on American manufacturing, and there are few signs they will abate. And the nation’s strained finances – and paralyzed politics -- limit what government can do to help.

The president’s embrace of manufacturing comes during a campaign in which his rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has also pledged to rebuild the sector. Obama’s strategists see political gain in the relentless focus on manufacturing, drawing a contrast with Romney’s background as someone who financially invested in industrial companies but never ran one, and his criticism of the auto bailout.

But Obama has his own vulnerabilities. Romney and Republicans say there is already an example of Obama’s manufacturing policy at work — the “green jobs” program that benefited political donors and lobbyists, such as the backers of the failed solar energy company Solyndra.

A long slide

Manufacturing, long a source of high wage jobs, has been shrinking as a portion of the economy for 45 years, from representing more than a quarter of economic activity to just 12 percent today, a decline that helps explain the nation’s anxiety about the future of the middle class.