The Hill News

President Obama plans a summer bus tour throughout Midwestern states, a trip intended to boost economic morale in the region and shore up political support in battleground states.

The president will embark on the bus tour, a rare mode of travel for a sitting president, later this month, a White House official said Wednesday. The tour will be run by the White House, and not Obama's reelection campaign.

There's no set schedule yet for the president's trip, but it's almost certain to include a bevy of stops in states where the economy is sputtering, and Democrats suffered the brunt of their electoral "shellacking" in 2010.

The trip is being cast as an opportunity for Obama to shift back to the issue of jobs and the economy, according to the New York Times, whic! h first reported the detail.

The timing of the tour, during the annual congressional recess in August, allows Obama to use the bully pulpit relatively unimpeded by opposing Republican voices in Congress.

The choice of the Midwest as a destination (no specific stops have been planned as of yet) is a telling one for the administration. Those states have been some of the areas hit hardest by the most recent recession, and suffer from some of the nation's highest unemployment rates.

While Obama won many of the Midwest's largest and most populous states (he only lost the Dakotas and Missouri, of the states defined by the Census Bureau as Midwestern), Democrats suffered some of their most devastating losses in many of those same states in 2010.

The most recent warning sign for Obama popped up Monday, when a Quinnipiac University poll found Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney (Mass.) leading Obama in the Keystone State.