http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=D5440F2B-B0D8-4D6D-BC60-838F9A1951F6 Obama cancels Thursday trips, citing Ebola response
By: Jennifer Epstein
October 15, 2014 09:04 PM EDT
President Barack Obama has canceled his Thursday travel to Rhode Island and New York so that he can continue monitoring the U.S. response to Ebola, the White House said Wednesday night.
More details about the president’s activities on Ebola will be released on Thursday morning, the White House said.
The scrapping of Thursday’s trip comes after the White House postponed the president’s Wednesday travel to New Jersey and Connecticut for a fundraiser and a campaign rally. Instead, Obama spent about two hours on Wednesday afternoon meeting with members of his Cabinet and other senior officials to discuss the administration’s efforts to counter the disease in the United States and in Africa.
The White House referred to Wednesday’s travel change as a postponement of political activities, but described the changed plans for Thursday as a cancellation, suggesting that the events may not be rescheduled. Obama had planned to deliver a speech on women and the economy at Rhode Island College in Providence, giving an indirect boost to Gina Raimondo, the Democratic candidate for governor. He was then slated to travel to Garden City, in Long Island’s Nassau County, for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser.
While White House officials resisted suggestions Wednesday that politics had factored into the decision to tweak travel plans, the changes convey to the public that the president has taken a leadership role in managing the crisis and that values governing over campaigning. But it’s clear they’re attuned to the potentially bad optics of a president playing politics as a deadly disease spreads.
Obama and his aides have chosen to carry on with his planned travel amid other crises as his aides argued that he could do the same work from the road as he could from the White House.
The president and his team consider “each of these situations … on a case-by-case basis, as you would expect,” press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday. “In this situation, the president felt it was important to convene a meeting of the senior members of his administration who are responsible for responding to this particular incident.”
