The audacity of Obama

Can the President really pose as the ‘fair shake’ candidate?

Barack Obama knows that, after three unsuccessful years as president, he cannot again sell himself to the electorate as a messiah who brings hope and change. The hope that accompanied his election vanished as the American economy continued to sink. Little has changed. But the unpopularity of the Republicans — widely seen, even among conservatives, as America’s nasty party — has given Obama an opportunity to re-invent himself for re-election in 2012. He is now the president who wants to ‘give everyone a fair shot’: he stands for honest, hard-working people against big business; for blue-collar jobs against multinational asset-strippers; for working mothers against Washington lobbyists.

As his exemplar, Obama has called on the legend of a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt. According to popular history, TR stood up for plain folks against greedy plutocrats, and won. (He was also, curiously, the man upon whom John McCain tried to model himself when running against Obama in 2008.)