Sights on 2012

April 5, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Photo by: M. Spencer Green

Photo

In this Aug. 23, 2008 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama D-Ill., and his vice presidential running mate Sen. Joe Biden D-Del. applaud at a campaign stop in Springfield, Ill. President Obama formally launched his re-election campaign Monday, April 4, 2011, urging grass-roots supporters central to his first White House run to mobilize again to protect the change he's brought over the past two years.

Obama announces he’ll seek second term

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

When he ran for president in 2008, candidate Barack Obama argued for a new kind of politics, something beyond the usual partisan divide and more than the typical backbiting that often led to paralysis. After two years of ideological battles over health care and the economy, Obama announced Monday that he will seek another term. His recent comments suggest he likely will try to bring back the same post-partisan theme, coupled with frequent statements that he has achieved the changes he has promised.

Running for re-election is different from running for the first time because the incumbent has a record that voters can evaluate. Obama will cite the health-care overhaul, his administration’s response to the recession and his foreign policy, which includes winding down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But that record also serves as a target for Obama’s opponents, who will argue the president has failed to show early leadership on important issues such as the no-fly zone in Libya. Where the president has acted, Republicans will argue, his policies have been wrongheaded, such as his health-care overhaul or his economic policies.

“Even though I’m focused on the job you elected me to do, and the race may not reach full speed for a year or more, the work of laying the foundation for our campaign must start today,” Obama said in an email to his supporters announcing his candidacy. The president has eschewed the hoopla that often goes with gearing up a campaign for a more quiet entrance, which had been widely expected.

“We’ve always known that lasting change wouldn’t come quickly or easily. It never does,” he said. “But the cause of making a lasting difference for our families, our communities and our country has never been about one person. And it will succeed only if we work together.”

For Obama, the key to working together is the new politics, based on traditional American values and fueled by a need for major change to deal with big problems. While running in 2008, he often sounded those notes.

“I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes, not incremental changes, not small changes,” Obama said early in January 2008. “I think that there are a whole host of Republicans, and certainly independents, who have lost trust in their government, who don’t believe anybody is listening to them, who are staggering under rising costs of health care, college education, don’t believe what politicians say. And we can draw those independents and some Republicans into a working coalition, a working majority for change.”

America in 2008 was at a turning point, Obama said at a recent Democratic National Committee event in Washington, where he summarized the needs he saw at the time.

“So our campaign was geared toward the notion that there are time-tested values that bind us together as Americans — a belief in hard work and individual initiative and the free market, but also community, looking out for one another, embracing diversity — and that our task was to make sure that we worked hard to seize this moment and make sure that our institutions, our politics, our government were all working to ensure that these values that date back to our founding would be renewed and live for this generation and the next,” he told fellow Democrats.

The president then went on to repeat the themes that likely will be heard over and over in different forms and forums in the next year.

“I think that the American people sensed that. Even when they disagreed with us, I think they sensed that our real objective here was to make sure that we had a government that was worthy of the decency and goodness of the American people,” Obama said. “I don’t want us ever to lose that spirit. I don’t want us ever to look back and say, ‘You know what, we said things that we didn’t believe in, or we pursued policies that weren’t the best possible policies for the country, just because it made for smart and convenient politics.’”