Low blows, lower turnouts and low expectations: Four years after he was swept to victory, how Obama's election campaign is a joyless slog
Barack Obama was swept to the White House in 2008 by a wave of idealism and inspirational campaigning in which he encapsulated the mood of the nation with his slogans of ‘Hope’, ‘Change’ and ‘Yes we can’.
Then, his message was a fundamentally positive one. Americans wanted an end to the Bush era but that almost went without saying. Obama pointed to his own vision of the country; a post-partisan, post-racial America in which gridlock in Washington was ended and common-sense centrist solutions were adopted.
What a difference four years makes. Obama is campaigning ferociously for a second term – and he is a candidate who would have probably have been disdained by the Obama of 2008.
Obama is waging a relentlessly negative campaign of changing the subject from the one that, overwhelmingly, most Americans care about – the economy. Every week there is a new issue his campaign seizes on, preferring to talk about something, anything other than jobs and 8.3 per cent unemployment.
While Obama is still drawing sizable crowds, they are nothing like the size of those who flocked to see him in 2008. In Las Vegas, Obama held a rally in a high school before more than 2,000 people but there was space for plenty more.
On the outskirts of Manchester, New Hampshire on Monday morning, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan attracted more than 3,000 people who patiently queued in lines across a field to be searched by the Secret Service.
Continued
