What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? I’m catching up on two stories I didn’t have time to write about during the past week: President Barack Obama’s choice of Jim Yong Kim to be next president of the World Bank, and Vice President Joe Biden’s March 28 visits to Davenport and Sioux City. Kim was born in South Korea but grew up in Muscatine, where his family moved when he was five years old. More clips about Kim and Biden’s latest Iowa trip are after the jump.

Sad news from the south side of Des Moines: Cha Cha, the male lion at the Blank Park Zoo, was euthanized this week after being diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. He was 16 years old.

This is an open thread; all topics welcome.  

President Obama announced his nomination of Jim Yong Kim for president of the World Bank at a March 23 press conference. Radio Iowa posted the video from that press conference and some excerpts from the president’s remarks:

Kim’s father was a dentist who also taught at the University of Iowa’s dental school. Kim, who was the valedictorian of his senior class in Muscatine, attended the University of Iowa for a year on an engineering scholarship before transferring to Brown. He earned a medical degree from Harvard. Kim has been the president of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire for the past three years.

His status as co-founder of “Partners in Heath” – a group that works around the globe to provide health care for the poor – prompted President Obama to consider him as the future leader of the World Bank.

“The leader of the World Bank should have a deep understanding of both the role that development plays in the world and the importance of creating conditions where assistance is no longer needed. I believe that nobody is more qualified to carry out that mission than Dr. Jim Kim,” President Obama said during a Rose Garden news conference on Friday. “It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency.”

In the 1990s, during work in Peru, Dr. Kim helped pioneer a cure for tuberculosis that could not be treated with certain types of drugs.

“Jim has truly global experience. He’s worked from Asia to Africa to the Americas, from capitols to small villages,” President Obama said. “His personal story exemplifies the great diversity of our country and the fact that anyone can make it as far as he has, as long as they’re willing to work hard and look out for others – and his experience makes him ideally suited to forge partnerships all around the world.”

Before going to Harvard’s faculty and then on to Dartmouth, Kim was director of the HIV/Aids department in the World Health Organization.

“I’ve made HIV/Aids and the fight against that dreaded disease and the promotion of public health a cornerstone of my development agenda, building on some of the outstanding work that was done by President Bush,” Obama said. “We pursue these things around the globe because it’s the right thing to do and also because healthy populations promote growth and prosperity and I’m pleased that Jim brings that particular experience with him to his new job.”

Most World Bank presidents come from a finance background. I like the idea of someone deeply rooted in the public health community running this organization. The Partners in Health program welcomed Obama’s choice in a statement that provided more background on Kim’s career:

Dr. Kim is an infectious disease specialist and medical anthropologist who has been working to serve the poor across the globe for nearly three decades. He and Paul Farmer met as medical students at Harvard and joined with Thomas J. White, Ophelia Dahl, and Todd McCormack in 1987 to found Partners In Health.

Dr. Kim previously served as Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and as Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. From 2004 to 2006, he headed the HIV/AIDS Department at the World Health Organization.

Julie Pace of the Associated Press described Kim as ” a surprise pick aimed in part at fending off challenges from developing nations eager to end the U.S. monopoly of the top job at the international institution.”

The 187-nation World Bank focuses on fighting poverty and promoting development. It is a leading source of development loans for countries seeking financing to build dams, roads and other infrastructure projects.

Several developing nations sought to break the U.S. leadership streak when current Bank President Robert Zoellick announced he would step down at the end of June. […]

In addition to Kim, Obama was joined in the Rose Garden by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, both of whom could have had the job but were not interested.

Senior administration officials said it was Clinton who first recommended Kim to Obama.

Obama, aware of the concerns of the developing world, expanded his search beyond the usual slate of high-ranking government officials and prominent business leaders. Officials described internal White House strategy only on condition of anonymity.

Muscatine natives who remember Kim growing up in the 1970s shared their reflections with the Muscatine Journal.

Vice President Joe Biden spoke at PCT Engineered Systems in Davenport on March 28. The Obama re-election campaign highlighted these excerpts from his speech in a press release:

I’ve come here today with a simple message:  Manufacturing is coming back. And that’s good news for America, and for America’s middle class.

·         430,000 new manufacturing jobs since January 2010.  More than 15,000 right here in the state of Iowa.

·         Fastest growth since the 1990s.

After years of hearing about outsourcing, a new word has come into our vocabulary: insourcing.  Jobs that left the United States are coming back.  Plants that closed are opening, reinvented.

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Ultimately it all comes down to the same question-the real question of this election, and the challenge of our time:

Will we be a country that values the role of workers in the success of a business, and values the middle class in the success of the economy?

Or will we go backward, to the same disastrous philosophy that rewarded speculators rather than builders?

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Because to President Obama and me, rebuilding our manufacturing sector and rebuilding our country are one and the same.

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Mitt Romney has been remarkably consistent — as an individual investor, a businessman, as Governor of Massachusetts, and now as a candidate for President.

Remarkably consistent.

Consistently wrong.  

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When he was Governor of Massachusetts, he vetoed a bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature that would have stopped the state from outsourcing contracts overseas.  That resulted in millions of dollars flowing to companies running call centers in India.

It’s no surprise that Massachusetts was losing manufacturing jobs twice as fast as the rest of the country while Governor Romney was in charge.  The third worst rate in the country.

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We’re both talking about tax cuts to manufacturers.  The difference is:  Our tax cuts go to companies that create jobs over here.  Governor Romney’s tax cuts go to companies that create jobs overseas.

It’s fundamentally different philosophy from ours.

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The Wall Street Journal wrote, and I’m quoting, “Romney appeared to scoff, first in Detroit, then in Florida, at the notion of manufacturing as a job engine for the future.”

So look folks, we have a choice in this election:

Between our philosophy that believes manufacturing is central to our economy, and their philosophy that scoffs at it.

Between our philosophy that says there is nothing “out of touch” about fighting for the future of the middle class.  And a philosophy that says if the folks at the top do well, that’s good enough.

The Quad-City Times’ Ed Tibbetts and Eugene Kiely of FactCheck.org checked some of Biden’s claims about job losses and subsequent gains in the manufacturing sector.

The Obama campaign must be genuinely worried about carrying Iowa this fall, because Biden was just in Ames on March 1 to give a different campaign speech about the economy. The latest Iowa poll by Selzer & Co for the Des Moines Register found Obama trailing three out of four Republican presidential candidates here.

After his Davenport visit, Biden went to Sioux City, where he did a private fundraiser/meeting with “grassroots supporters” and spoke to about 75 boys at the Boys Club of Sioux City.