{"id":410065,"date":"2010-03-09T18:59:22","date_gmt":"2010-03-09T23:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c60fd53ef01310f833fbe970c"},"modified":"2010-03-09T18:59:22","modified_gmt":"2010-03-09T23:59:22","slug":"giannoulias-campaign-feels-need-to-stress-obama-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/410065","title":{"rendered":"Giannoulias campaign feels need to stress Obama support"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Posted by John Chase<\/em> at 5:58 p.m.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>It\u2019s usually understood that a Democratic president supports his party\u2019s candidates for office, especially when the nominee in question is running for the U.S. Senate seat the president himself once held.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>But today Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias\u2019 campaign went out of its way to announce that he does, in fact, have the backing of the White House. <br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>Giannoulias campaign sent out a news release highlighting remarks by President Barack Obama\u2019s press secretary about the president&#8217;s support for Giannoulias, who not only is the Democratic nominee running for Obama\u2019s old Senate seat but also is known for being a longtime personal friend of the president\u2019s.<br \/>\n\u201cAlexi Giannoulias is the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate and has the support and the backing of the White House,\u201d Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said during a daily White House briefing.<\/p>\n<p>In recent weeks, Giannoulias has had to answer questions about the implosion of Broadway Bank, which his family owns and where he served as a top executive before becoming Illinois treasurer.<\/p>\n<p>During his visit to the White House, Giannoulias met with top Obama aide David Axelrod, who also has known Giannoulias for years.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>Before Obama became president, he and Giannoulias regularly played basketball together and Obama endorsed Giannoulias\u2019 bid for treasurer in 2006. Giannoulias is facing U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>Illinois Republicans took Gibbs&#8217; same remarks and tried to spin them in the opposite direction, shooting off a news release proclaiming Gibbs \u201cdownplays\u201d Giannoulias\u2019 visit.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>In addition to meeting with Axelrod, Giannoulias was scheduled to attend a reception tonight with Obama in the East Room honoring Greek Independence Day.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>At that event, Obama acknowledged Giannoulias&#8217; presence by asking him to stand up. <br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>&quot;We have some outstanding members of Congress who are here, and we\u2019ve got at least one potential member of Congress &#8212; Alexi, stand up &#8212; from the state of Illinois,&quot; Obama said, according to a transcript. &quot;We\u2019ve got in fact, in addition to Alexi, we\u2019ve got a lot of Greek American friends here who\u2019ve been great friends and supporters of mine, including folks here from Chicago.\u00a0 I think we\u2019ve got just about all of Greektown here.&quot;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Posted by John Chase at 5:58 p.m.It\u2019s usually understood that a Democratic president supports his party\u2019s candidates for office, especially when the nominee in question is running for the U.S. Senate seat the president himself once held.But today Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias\u2019 campaign went out of its way to announce that he does, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3992,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-410065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3992"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}