May 7, 2012
Flashpoint

Hope and change powered Barack Obama to the White House four years ago, but can he play the same gambit twice?

Conventional wisdom says no, given the fact that the US president is the steward of America’s demoralised economic state, but Obama, setting off on a six-month trek to a new presidential election, begs to differ.

“If people ask you what this campaign is about, you tell them it’s still about hope,” Obama on Saturday told crowds chanting “four more years” in battleground states Ohio and Virginia.

“I still believe … I still believe we are not as divided as our politics suggest,” Obama said, in an echo of the 2004 Democratic convention speech which shot the then unknown Illinois lawmaker to prominence. “I still believe we have more in common than the pundits tell us. I still believe in you, and I’m asking you to keep believing in me.”

Obama, at the first official rallies of his bid for the second term that all presidents crave, injected some badly needed poetry and excitement back into his brand after three prosaic, slogging years of governing. The president showed again on Saturday he can still move core supporters, who left an arena here buzzing. Carolyn Johnson — who traveled to the rally in Virginia’s state capital Richmond from Warsaw, 50 miles to the east — said she was inspired by Obama’s pep talk. The president seems bent on renewing the passion of 2008 in parts of his new stump speech, though other passages seemed to reflect an attempt by his campaign to throw out red meat to Democratic interest groups to see what works.

Before he bounded on stage, his campaign showed a video featuring Edith Childs, the elderly woman who inspired a tired Obama on a tough day in South Carolina four years ago and coined his chant “Fired, Up, Ready to Go!” And the Obama camp set the table for his debut swing with scorched earth negative campaign ads, questioning millionaire Romney over his Swiss bank account and asking whether he would have had the moxie to kill Osama bin Laden.

Though Obama’s job rating has been fairly robust, just below the 50 per cent threshold presidents see as boosting their reelection hopes, 47 per cent in a RealClearPolitics poll average still say they disapprove of the president.

Some analysts believe that Obama’s arguments on framing a “fair shot” for everyone in a more equitable economy only work if people feel a sense of imminent personal crisis is over.

Interestingly, Obama chose to stage his first official rallies in two states where the state unemployment rate is below the national average: the jobless rate was 7.5 per cent in Ohio and 5.6 per cent in Virginia in March.

Should Obama win both states, in which he currently leads Romney in latest polls, the electoral map sets up in such a way that he would be almost certain to retain the White House.

Republicans appear to scent the danger, and are desperate to make the election a referendum on what they see as a poor economic record. —
Source: Kahleej Times