"OBAMA SAYS WHAT SWING VOTERS NEED TO HEAR."

John Nichols (The Nation):

What do swing voters want? Investment by the U.S. government in America's future rather than the war in Iraq.

A groundbreaking survey of swing voters in key states across the country -- commissioned by USAction and the USAction Education Fund; conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research -- finds that these most sought after electors will cross party lines to back a "come home America" message.

"Voters are focused this year on issues like ending the war in Iraq, addressing the health care crisis and developing a new energy policy." says Anna Greenberg, who ran the poll. "Underlying the support for the agenda is a clear sense that we have had the wrong priorities and that the war in Iraq has taken away from a focus on our problems at home."

Remarkably, on the day the poll was released by USAction -- as part of a campaign in support of it "Invest in America's Future plan" to reverse the priorities of a country that spends freely on wars abroad but fails to invest in infrastructure improvements and other job-creation initiatives at home -- Illinois Senator Barack Obama channeled the core message of the survey.

"For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America. I'm proposing a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years," Obama told workers at a General Motors assembly plant in Wisconsin, where he is campaigning hard in advance of Tuesday's Democratic presidential primary. "This investment will multiply into almost half a trillion dollars of additional infrastructure spending and generate nearly two million new jobs – many of them in the construction industry that's been hard hit by this housing crisis. The repairs will be determined not by politics, but by what will maximize our safety and homeland security; what will keep our environment clean and our economy strong. And we'll fund this bank by ending this war in Iraq. It's time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead."

Swing voters -- not anti-war activists but the independents and partisan waverers who will swing this fall's election -- want to shift spending from Iraq to Iowa, from Baghdad to Baltimore.

The senator from Illinois says, "It's time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead."

The "gets it" award goes to Barack Obama.

Barack Obama