Barack Obama made his name with elevated rhetoric, though his professorial soliloquies can draw yawns and conservatives mock him as an empty suit hostage to the teleprompter.
But in the last days of his last campaign, the US president is finding a new voice as he plays to gritty crowds in down-on-its luck Ohio rather than the starry-eyed thousands seduced by his change crusade four years ago.
Obama, who has struggled for a persuasive tone while running a rather joyless re-election campaign, has finally boiled his case for himself, and against Republican Mitt Romney, down to a couple of pithy paragraphs.
He told small but vocal crowds on a small town tour of Ohio — possibly the pivotal state in Tuesday’s election — that America was “on the move.”
“In 2008, we were in the middle of two wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Today, our businesses have created nearly 5.5 million new jobs and this morning, we learned that companies hired more workers in October than at any time in the last eight months.
“The American auto industry is back on top. Home values, housing starts are on the rise. We’re less dependent on foreign oil than any time in the last 20 years … the war in Iraq is over. The war in Afghanistan is ending. Al-Qaeda has been decimated. Osama bin Laden is dead.”
A raspy-voiced Obama pounded out his populist mantra over rising cheers from crowds packed into two school gymnasiums and a sandy barn Friday, as he stumped for blue collar votes in rustbelt towns ravaged by globalization.
How his campaign team must wish he was as succinct in a doleful first debate performance in October that let Romney back into the campaign.
It is an irony that the re-election of Obama, who won power by expanding the electoral weight of African Americans, Hispanics and the highly educated middle class, may depend on minimizing his losses among working class whites.
That is what brought him to sometimes hostile territory outside one of Ohio’s three main cities, Columbus, on Friday.
As long as he has been in big time politics, Obama has faced the rap that he is a lofty intellectual, whose anthems to the common working man ring hollow.
But, perhaps realizing that after Monday, he will never again be a candidate, he is campaigning with renewed passion, freed from the cares of office that grayed his brand.
“This is coming from his loins,” said Obama’s longtime messaging guru David Axelrod, before adding, after reporters chuckled, “I just wanted to get loins in the story.”
“I have known him for 20 years, have worked closely with him for 10, and I have never seen him more exhilarated. When he looks out at those crowds, he can see who he is fighting for.”
Between events Friday, Obama’s motorcade wound across empty prairies where grain silos glistened under a watery late autumn sun in a tedious landscape broken only by power lines.
Now and then, his bulky armored limousine cruised through ragged towns of wooden houses with peeling paint, nail salons and funeral homes, with the coming of winter foretold by stacks of firewood in overgrown backyards.
In the former smokestack town of Lima, in Allen County, which went 60 percent to 40 percent to Republican John McCain in 2008, Obama achieved new brevity and power with an argument against Republican economics.
“We tried it, and what did we get? We got falling incomes, record deficits, the slowest job growth in half a century, and we ended up with an economic crisis that we’ve been cleaning up after ever since,” Obama said.
“We tried our ideas — they worked. We tried their ideas — didn’t work,” Obama said, comparing the 1990s golden age of Bill Clinton’s presidency with the crisis he says was induced by George W. Bush.
There was something about the simplicity of Obama’s argument and accompanying hand gestures that made an onlooker wonder if the president had been watching tapes of Clinton, whose intellect was disguised by the common touch of a master campaigner.
Obama, who in 2008 spoke of the “fierce urgency of now” and told Americans “we are the change we seek,” avoids such poetry now, after a presidency haunted by economic woes and humbled by unmet expectations.
But Romney, in his latest political incarnation proclaiming himself an agent of change, will not steal Obama’s calling card without a fight.
“Now, the thing is, we know what change looks like, and what he’s selling ain’t it,” the new staccato Obama said.
“Refusing to answer questions about the details of your policies until after the election — not change,” Obama said in another Ohio town.
“Now, in four days, Springfield, four days — four days for four years … in four days, you’ve got a choice to make.”
Should Obama win Tuesday’s election, in which he appears to have the slimmest of leads over Romney, he will return to the grim reality of gridlocked, bitter Washington, and the exhaustion of governing.
A new governing persona, along the lines of his closing campaign skit and the no-nonsense pose he adopted when leading the emergency sparked by superstorm Sandy would possibly serve him well.
Obama ditches poetry, finds new voice
