Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back, © The New York Times, September 11, 2010, by Frank Rich, excerpt quoted verbatim:

NO, he can’t. President Obama can’t reverse the unemployment numbers by Election Day. He can’t get even a modest new stimulus bill past the Party of No, and even if he could, there would be few jobs to show for it until (maybe) 2011. Nor can he rewrite the history of his administration. Its signal accomplishments to date are an initial stimulus package that was overrun by the calamity at hand and a marathon health care battle as yet better known for its unseemly orgy of backroom wrangling than its concrete results. While that brawl raged, the White House seemed indifferent to the mounting number of Americans being tossed onto the Great Recession scrapheap.

And so the odds that Obama’s party will survive the midterms seem less than Indiana Jones’s in the Temple of Doom — as we are reminded hourly by the Beltway herd flogging the latest polls. The Democrats are facing a “historic” rout, an earthquake, a tidal wave — well, you know the drill. End of story.Unless it’s not. On Labor Day, the fighting Obama abruptly re-emerged, a far cry from the man whose Oval Office address on Iraq days earlier was about as persuasive as a hostage video. Speaking to workers in Milwaukee, the president finally started giving voice to the anger of America’s battered middle class. And he even let loose with a little anger of his own. The unspecified “powerful interests” aligned against him, he said, “talk about me like a dog.”

That inelegant line — “not in my prepared remarks,” Obama explained — landed because it was true and because he said it with a grin. Americans like their warriors happy, not petulant (cf, “You’re likable enough, Hillary”).

For a guy facing a tidal wave, the president was so ebullient, you had to wonder if he knew something we didn’t. Maybe he simply read the unabridged poll numbers rather than the CliffsNotes summaries of cable news. Those numbers are hardly as monochromatic as advertised. Obama’s approval rating, for months a consistent (not imploding) 45-ish percent, still makes him arguably America’s most popular national politician. The polls also continue to show that, while both political parties are despised, Democrats are slightly less despised than Republicans. In The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, for instance, 36 percent of those surveyed rate the Democrats positively, compared with the G.O.P.’s 30 percent. It’s only when the November horse-race matchup is limited to “likely voters” that the tidal wave rolls in, giving the Republicans a roughly 10-point lead.

That spread is the Democrats’ dread “enthusiasm gap.” And since that gap can’t be bridged in two months by new government programs or divine intervention for the nearly one in six Americans who are un- or underemployed, what could give the Democrats even a slender reed of hope? If there’s any plausible answer, it can be drawn from the single poll finding that is most devastating for Obama, the question (as worded by The Washington Post/ABC News) of whether “he understands the problems of people like you.” There his numbers really have imploded. When he arrived in office, 72 percent answered Yes and 24 percent No. As of last week, Yes had fallen to 50 and No had doubled to 48.

That a former community organizer and insurgent presidential candidate from a rocky middle-class background could be branded an out-of-touch elitist is not entirely the fault of his critics. Obama has perhaps never recovered from handing his administration’s plum economic jobs to Robert Rubin protégés with dirty hands from the bubble — Lawrence Summers, a deregulation advocate from the Clinton administration, and Timothy Geithner, an indulgent regulator at the New York Fed. Their presence has helped Obama’s more unscrupulous adversaries get away with the lie that his White House, not President Bush’s, created TARP. Indeed, such is the Obama administration’s identification with the tarnished Wall Street culture that even Michael Bloomberg mistakenly identified Geithner, a longtime public servant who never worked at an investment bank, as a Goldman Sachs alumnus at a public event in New York last month.

The White House’s not-on-C-Span deal-making with the health care industry behemoths only cemented the administration’s corporatist image, as did Obama’s meandering path to what still looks like a loophole-ridden compromise on financial regulatory reform. This is why even many Democrats have become lukewarm in their conviction that their president “understands the problems of people like you.”

For Obama to make Americans believe he does understand their problems and close the enthusiasm gap, he cannot merely make changes of campaign style. Sporadic photo ops in shirtsleeves or factory settings persuade no one; a few terrific speeches can’t always ride to the rescue. Nor would there be much point in firing Summers and Geithner — a political nonstarter anyway, now that it’s been opportunistically proposed by the G.O.P. leader John Boehner (his one good idea). Certainly Obama can add powerful new hands who might actually fight to protect ordinary Americans from the sharks; the star consumer advocate, Elizabeth Warren, should have been front and center, even in a Senate confirmation battle, long ago. But in the short term between now and Election Day, Obama may have the most to gain by sharpening his attack on those “powerful interests” who liken him to a dog. A top dog bites back (with a smile).

In a second forceful speech last week, delivered outside Cleveland, Obama titillated the political press by calling out Boehner by name eight times. But though Boehner is a nice soft target — he belittled the economic meltdown as an “ant” and has staked his political capital on extending tax cuts for America’s wealthiest 3 percent — he’s merely a front-man. Obama must also call out the powerful interests who are pulling the G.O.P.’s strings (and filling its coffers), whether on Wall Street or in Big Oil or any other sector where special interests are aligned against reform in the public interest. ….

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Comment by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: What we are seeing here is a glimmer of that hope which inspired us so in the 2008 campaign. Wouldn’t it be something for Barack Obama to actually come out for the people and ardently against special interests, as we had always hoped? Certainly, special interests, Wall Street, big business and the rich and powerful are NOT the President’s friend. Wall Street, which used to divide its money almost equally between Democrats and Republicans in political campaigns, is now solidly in the Republican corner. Maybe the President has wised up and sees who his friends really are — we the people — and just who they aren’t. Is Obama now willing to take the bad guys on, and make that what the campaign is all about this fall? That would be one campaign platform that would close the enthusiasm gap the Democrats face, and really fast. We can only hope. Mr. President, are you listening?

Visit MyBarackObama.com Vote 2010 and see the campaign speeches the President has lined up.

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