Obama speeches touch on nostalgic themes

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Barack Obama reminisces about taking a wrong turn and getting lost. Fumbling to fold a map. Dashing to Kinko’s to copy campaign fliers.

The president’s re-election campaign increasingly is sounding like a nostalgia tour. His speeches stroll through elections past, serving up fond memories of his days running as a political unknown, identifying early political inspirations and reminding voters that, win or lose, this will be his last campaign after 13 appearances on the ballot since 1996.

“I’m term-limited,” he tells crowds – a flat statement of the obvious that always gets a laugh. “You get a little nostalgic, and you start thinking about your first political campaigns.”

These are not the casual ad-libs of a candidate suddenly turning wistful, but a rhetorical device designed to transport Obama back to the days when he was the kind of ordinary guy voters felt they could relate to, long before he rode in limousines and flew on Air Force One.

“Sometimes I couldn’t find a parking spot, and so I’d end up being late, and if it was raining, I’d have to fumble with my umbrella, and I’d come in kind of drenched,” Obama told a crowd in Oakland, Calif., earlier this week.

“There were these things called maps, because we did not have GPS,” he told a chuckling crowd in Portland, Ore., the next day. “And they were on paper, and you’d have to fold them. You’d unfold them, and then trying to fold them back was really difficult.”

The unwritten subtext: I’m just like you, and my policies flow from our shared experiences. Mitt Romney, he’s a rich guy whose policies would benefit the elite.

“It’s the silver-spoon-in- his-mouth attack — more gently insinuated,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert on political rhetoric and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

It’s also a rejoinder to Romney’s own characterizations of Obama as isolated in the presidential bubble and out of touch with the economic concerns of ordinary Americans.

Obama uses his reminiscing riffs to trace a direct connection between his biography and those of the voters he met in early campaigns. The older couples, he says, reminded him of his grandfather who served in World War II and his grandmother who worked a bomber assembly line. The single moms, he says, reminded him of his own mother, who worked to put herself and her two kids through college. The working couples, he says, reminded him of his wife’s parents.

“I would be traveling and I’d meet people, and I’d say, ‘You know what, their story is my story,’” Obama told a crowd in Texas this month.

Robin Lakoff, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, said Obama’s goal in getting “all personal, fuzzy-wuzzy and nostalgic” is to re-create an intimacy with voters.