O’Malley launching 16-city ‘Rebuild the American Dream’ tour

Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley will visit 16 Iowa cities in August on a “Rebuild the American Dream” tour that kicks off during his appearance at the Iowa State Fair.

The former Maryland governor’s campaign released Thursday a set of 15 economic and environmental goals that would be a “roadmap” for an O’Malley presidency. Those goals include reaching an annual wage growth rate of 4 percent by 2018, cutting the unemployment rate for young people in half over a three year period and giving students a path to a debt-free college degree.

“I see a world in which our creativity and imagination have expanded the outer bounds of human achievement and potential as never before,” O’Malley wrote in a post on Medium. “Government helped make so much of this progress possible. And yet, creativity and imagination are not exactly the first words people today associate with our government. I want to change that.”

O’Malley is starting a three-day swing through Iowa on Thursday with a 4 p.m. speech at The Des Moines Register’s Soapbox at the 2015 Iowa State Fair.

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On Friday, the former governor will make stops in Cedar Rapids and Cedar Falls before speaking at the annual Iowa Wing Ding alongside Democratic rivals at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake. O’Malley has Saturday campaign stops in Sioux City and Council Bluffs.

During the rest of August, O’Malley’s tour will include stops in Indianola, Fairfield, Mount Pleasant, Davenport, Muscatine, Sheldon, Storm Lake, Ames, Grinnell and Iowa City, according to his campaign. Dates for the stops are still being finalized.