ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, November 4 2010

Remember the real Obama
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

The 2012 presidential campaign began Wednesday, against the backdrop of an electoral map bathed in red. Republicans won big on all fronts: They netted numerous governorships, reclaimed control of the House, picked up seats in the Senate — including President Barack Obama's old one — and made historic gains in state legislatures.

Critics of the Tea Party, Obama included, were hoping the movement would not live up to its pre-election hype. Some weaker Tea Party candidates lost, but the victories of many others and high voter turnout generated by the movement proved its critics wrong. Exit polls conducted for the Associated Press found that two of every three Republican votes came from Tea Party supporters.

Lest Obama chalk his party's losses up to Tea Partiers alone, exit polls also found women, independents, suburbanites and white Catholics abandoning the president's hope-and-change train for the saner platforms of Republican House candidates. Four in 10 voters said that they cast their House ballots as protest votes against Obama, and more than half said they disapprove of the president's job performance. Perhaps most damaging of all to Obama, the independent voters he won in 2008 came out swinging against him on Tuesday. They disapproved of his job performance by a margin of almost 3 to 2, and nearly six in 10 backed Republicans.

So where does Obama go from here? Some in his party want him to dig in his heels, stay on his big-spending, transform-the-country course and simply do a better job of proclaiming the gospel according to Barack. They believe that the great unwashed masses who oppose Obamacare, stimulus spending, tax hikes, cap-and-trade, government funding of abortion and all the rest suffer from a collective anxiety disorder that can be cured only with the soothing words of our Orator-in-Chief.

Obama himself seems inclined to this approach, judging from pre-election comments in which he blamed his unpopularity on voter irrationality. "Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared," Obama said, before urging voters to channel their "trauma" into looking "forward" — otherwise known as his direction — rather than "looking backwards."

What Obama and his advisers do not seem to realize is that voters now know exactly what is his idea of progress. They have seen the hard-core ideology and the astronomical bills behind his hazy campaign pledges of hope and change. And on Tuesday, they rendered their collective judgment on it: Keep your hope, and we'll keep our change.

Obama faces an uphill battle to win back these disillusioned voters, but he might succeed if he extends the olive branch to Republicans that he refused them before, adopts a bipartisan posture on a few choice issues and spends the next two years persuading Americans that he represents the voice of sanity in a nation gone mad with extremism. He is probably too much of an ideologue to abandon his more radical policies, but he can promote them in stealthier ways and shelve some for the second term that he hopes to win by returning to the vague platitudes of his 2008 campaign. His brand of gauzy hope will be a harder sell the second time around, but no one should underestimate the volatile mix of voter amnesia and Obama's campaign-trail charisma.

Of course, if Obama wins a second term and no longer faces a re-election contest, all bets are off. The flashes of radicalism and contempt for ordinary Americans and their values that we glimpsed in the last two years will look tame compared with what awaits us in an Obama second term.

As wooing season for the 2012 president contest moves into high gear, voters should remember that regardless of which tack he takes in the coming months, the real Obama is the man we saw before the midterms. He is the hard-left partisan who decries his critics as enemies and extremists and blames his failures on everyone but himself.

It might be awhile before we see this Obama again, but if he wins a second term, he'll be back.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.