The president plans to travel in the southeast part of Iowa this week, visiting pockets of the state where the unemployment rate has reached double-digits.
President Obama will be in Fort Madison Tuesday, visiting the Siemens Energy plant where the blades for wind turbines are made. Fort Madison is in Lee County, which had an unemployment rate of nearly 11 percent in March. That’s two percentage points worse than it was during the same month a year ago.
Obama’s next stop on his Tuesday tour is Mount Pleasant, which sits in Henry County. The Henry County unemployment rate was 10.3 percent in March.
Later Tuesday afternoon Obama will hold a town hall meeting in Ottumwa at Indian Hills Community College. Ottumwa is in Wapello County, where the unemployment rate stood at 9.5 percent last month. That still is far above the statewide unemployment rate of 6.8 percent.
There are 99 counties in Iowa and a handful have unemployment rates in the four percent range. However, seven counties in Iowa have an unemployment rate of at least 10 percent. Here’s a map, showing the unemployment rates of each Iowa county.