Alas, it was not to be; Mr. Walker, a Republican who is facing a recall election that he has boldly predicted will be a bellwether for Mr. Obama’s own chances in Wisconsin, pulled out of the joint tour with the president at the last minute. Mr. Walker’s spokesman told reporters that the governor had the flu so he would not join Mr. Obama to congratulate Master Lock for bringing jobs back to the United States. Mr. Walker was apparently not too sick to show up at the airport to greet Mr. Obama, however, presenting the president with a Milwaukee Brewers baseball jersey and demurely declining, in a brief chat afterward with reporters, to take a whack at the president. “Today’s the president’s day,” he said, when reporters traveling with Mr. Obama tried to egg him on. “I’m appreciative he’s in Wisconsin, appreciative he’s focused on manufacturing. We’ll leave politics for another day.” Mr. Obama also has ostensibly been leaving politics for another day, focusing his remarks at Master Lock on the need to rein in unfair trading practices from China and restore American manufacturing jobs. He trotted out — again and again — the administration’s new catchphrase, insourcing. “You’ve all heard enough about outsourcing,” Mr. Obama said. “Well, more and more companies like Master Lock are now insourcing. They’re deciding that if the cost of doing business here is no longer much different than the cost of doing business in countries like China, they’d rather place their bets on America.” Mr. Obama — who, aides say, expressed concerns about unfair competition on Tuesday when China’s presumed next leader, Vice President Xi Jinping, visited the White House — several times made Beijing the counterpoint to his manufacturing narrative. He promised to use his just-announced trade enforcement unit to focus on investigating unfair trade practices in China. The president did make an indirect — albeit transparent — dig at the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, whose recent efforts to explain his 2008 “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” column, in light of the Michigan primary on Feb. 28, have been delighting Obama supporters. Mr. Obama pointedly held his bailout of the American auto industry as an example of how government intervention can help manufacturing jobs. “There were some folks,” he began, allowing a long, pointed pause, “who said we should just let it die.” “With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen,” he said, in a line that appears destined for campaign speeches to come. “And today, the American auto industry is back.” Mr. Obama’s stop in Milwaukee is the beginning of a three-day trip that is mostly a money run. After Milwaukee, the president was scheduled for stops in Southern California for several fund-raisers, including one co-hosted by the actor Will Ferrell. Then it is on to San Francisco for more fund-raisers, and Seattle, where he planned to make remarks at a Boeing facility before hitting another fund-raiser. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the president will have to walk a fine line between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, two big contributors to his campaign who have been at each other’s throats over the online piracy issue. “I believe the president enjoys support from people in both industries,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, told reporters traveling with the president. “We are absolutely committed to working to find solutions to the problem of copyright infringement and intellectual property rights infringement, but we need to do it in a way that doesn’t restrict Internet freedom.”
