Though Republicans still love to portray him as an urban elite, President Obama managed to more or less split the rural vote with John McCain during last year's election. Now, the White House is mounting a summer-long effort to help tailor the administration's agenda to small-town America.

Obama on Tuesday announced a rural tour that will see Cabinet secretaries fan out across the country to discuss issues including broadband deployment, rural health, economic development and agriculture. The tour begins on Wednesday, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack visit Wattsburg, Pa., to discuss telecommunications issues.

"Rural America is vast and diverse, and different communities face different challenges and opportunities," Obama said in a statement. "That's why we're going out to hear directly from the people of rural America about their needs and concerns and what my administration can do to support them."

House Democrats have their talking point about the cost of the climate change bill, and they’ve been hammering it all day. The average family would pay about “the cost of a postage stamp per day,” as House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland said on Fox News this morning.

But House Republicans have spent the day repeating a different quote from President Obama: that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his proposal for a cap and trade system for limiting carbon emissions. “President Obama has said himself that, under this cap-and-trade plan, electricity rates will skyrocket,” Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Kan., said at a press conference. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., repeated the charge on the House floor.

Oops! That wasn’t a very smart thing for Obama to say about the House climate change bill, was it? There’s only one catch: Obama wasn’t talking about the House bill, because it didn’t exist yet. The quote is from a year-and-a-half old interview Obama gave to the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board in January 2008, and it was about the more general cap-and-trade proposal he put out during the campaign.

The White House energy team was working overtime Friday afternoon to line up enough House votes to deliver one of President Obama's biggest legislative priorities: a comprehensive energy bill (HR 2454) that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

President Obama, climate czar Carol M. Browner, Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu were among the officials working over undecided Democrats on the hill. One message was a no vote would draw into question Democrats' ability to lead. Officials also were knocking down criticism from Greenpeace USA and other some quarters of the political left that the bill was insubstantial and put politics before science.

Obama put in one more public plug for the measure during a midday news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying it represented "enormous progress from where we have been."

When he served in the Senate, President Obama enthusiastically supported federal mandates to produce more biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel, predicting they would help break America's dependence on foreign oil.

But some of the provisions that Obama backed as a legislator are putting his EPA in a tough spot, forced to decide whether to increase the proportion with which ethanol is blended with gasoline.

The recession is weakening demand for motor fuels, making it more difficult to meet a requirement in the 2007 energy law (PL 110-140) requiring 12.95 billion gallons of biofuels to be utilized in 2010. Energy watchers say if the economy doesn't pick up soon, the rapidly expanding ethanol industry could hit a demand wall and be forced to idle production.