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Photo by Trip Jennings
RIO RANCHO — President Barack Obama played traveling salesman Thursday.
And his pitch — to reform the country’s credit card system — got an enthusiastic thumbs up from the 2,000 or so people packed into the Rio Rancho High School gymnasium.
“Enough is enough. It is time for strong, reliable protections for our consumers,” Obama said to cheers and whistles.
In a talk that resembled a campaign stump speech, the president spoke of high interest rates struggling American families are being charged in the middle of the worst economic times since the Great Depression.
To make his case, the president cited statistics, including that one in five Americans is laboring under interest rates above 20 percent for credit card debt.
The president stopped short of laying all the blame on credit card companies. He acknowledged the complexity of the situation, saying, “We have been complicit in these problems.”
“We’ve got to change how we act,” he said, citing Americans who had lived beyond their means. But he said the industry bore a substantial share of the blame for hiking up interest rates during poor economic times.
“These practices have only grown worse in this recession,” he said.
The president’s warm-up act was Christine Lardner, an Albuquerque woman who personally testified to one of those practices.
Lardner told the president of her family’s recent run-in with a credit card company in a note she sent him last week.
Due to tough economic times, Lardner told the Rio Rancho crowd, she and her husband recently put college expenses for one of their children on a credit card. Knowing they were close to the limit, she called the school to tell them not to charge an upcoming payment because the family would pay by a different method.
“The school made a mistake and charged an additional payment,” Lardner said.
The credit card company authorized the payment, sending the Lardners over their maximum. “I would have preferred to have been declined,” Lardner said.
The company later tripled the family’s rate on the credit card debt because they had eclipsed their maximum, she said.
That brought a chorus of boos from the crowd.
In addition to well attended by regular folks, the event also attracted members of the state’s Democratic political elite.
Gov. Bill Richardson was in the crowd, as was Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, House Speaker Ben Lujan and Sen. Majority Leader Michael Sanchez.
It was the first time that the president and Richardson were in the same room publicly since Richardson withdrew as the president’s nominee for U.S. Commerce Secretary. Richardson didn’t sit on the stage with the president — no elected officials did — but he did ride with the president to and from the event and also met with him in a small gathering that included Denish, Chavez, Lujan and Sanchez.
While Richardson didn’t sit on the stage, at one point the president did single him out, calling Richardson “one of the finest governors in the country.”
While Obama tailored his message to New Mexico, it was clear he was talking to a second audience: Congress.
He told the Rio Rancho crowd that he had called on federal lawmakers to send him the reform legislation so that he could sign it into law by Memorial Day.
The president’s speech came as federal lawmakers are deliberating credit card reform legislation, with the U.S. House having passed a version last week and the U.S. Senate currently debating its version.
Thursday’s speech in Rio Rancho was his first visit to New Mexico since his victory in November, a fact he heartily acknowledged to the boisterous crowd.
President Obama’s visit to Rio Rancho held a bit of political symbolism. Rio Rancho, once a sleepy community, now is the biggest city in Sandoval County, which is what many consider to be the swing county in a swing state.
President Bush took Sandoval in 2004 by about 5,000 votes. Obama, meanwhile, convincingly carried Sandoval County in November, winning by 7,000 votes.
As for why the president chose to visit New Mexico, Christine Sierra, a University of New Mexico political science professor said, that’s easy.
“He came to the Southwest to give his speech at (Arizona State University) and then he could come right next door, to a state that was very key in his election. And that is New Mexico,” Sierra said.
President Obama spoke at ASU’s commencement ceremony on Wednesday.
“He definitely wants to continue his presence in this state to expand his popularity,” Sierra said. “It is no doubt to keep the Democratic party front and center in the public’s mind.”
Sierra said the president also wanted to keep New Mexico’s congressional delegation front and center in the public’s mind.
Democrats, for the first time in decades, hold all the state’s congressional seats after last year’s general election.
He did that “in the sense of that he reminds them that he is leading a new administration and he has to work on congress and he is counting on support,” Sierra said.
