Obama's Dark Vision of America: Politico

Barack Obama is trying a reelection model that posits a broken country, the author writes. |
By KEITH KOFFLER | 11/16/11 12:16 AM EST Updated: 11/16/11 3:05 PM EST

America, in the view of President Barack Obama, is not a happy place. It is a dark region where people cheat each other; corporations brutalize the public, and opportunity is out of reach.

Obama’s relentless reelection focus on America’s demons is a communications error that could haunt his bid for a second term.

Americans want to be told the truth. They don’t want their president to pretend that the economy is thriving.

But what they probably won’t abide is a message that there is something fundamentally wrong with the nation that Obama, like some prophet preaching through Gomorrah, was sent to fix.

The last Democratic president to win reelection, Bill Clinton, mimicked Ronald Reagan’s feel-good “Morning in America” theme to coast to a second term.

But Obama is trying out a reelection model that posits a broken country which needs him to “finish the job” he started.

America, in Obama’s view, is an unfair place, where “our school system” is working “for just some children;” where immigrants live “in second-class status.”

The wealthiest — who do pay most of the federal income taxes — are unscrupulous cheats who would have their secretaries fork over a bigger percentage of their income to Uncle Sam than they do.

Corporations and their henchmen on Washington’s K Street have fixed the system so they can rip it off at will.

“Tell these members of Congress,” Obama instructed North Carolina high school students last month, in a pessimistic civics lesson, “that they don’t work for special interest, they don’t work for lobbyists. They work for you.”

Corrupt corporate interests are grabbing for themselves and lying to the public. “I did not run for office,” Obama said, “to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,”

As for insurers, Obama has charged that they used “deceptive and dishonest” methods to advertise their opposition to his health reform plan.

Together, the wealthy and corporations are assailing the middle class.

“The only class warfare I’ve seen,” Obama said in September, “is the battle that’s been waged against the middle class in this country for a decade.”

For too many, Obama suggests, the American Dream is dead or dying.