“We’re not going back… We’re going forward,” President Obama said during his formal campaign kickoff in Ohio. This rallying cry was pedestrian, and appropriately so. Obama is no longer a leader on horseback. His campaign — on the evidence of its first day — will be a long, unimaginative, partisan march to the sea.
Gone are the vast ambitions of national progress and healing. In Ohio on Saturday, Obama made a methodical appeal to various voting blocks — college-educated women, gays, Hispanics. He waded into the culture war on abortion, something he rarely did four years ago. And he accused the GOP of trickle-down hostility to the middle class.
To every interest group, a sop. On every wedge issue, a swat. To every class enemy, a turn in the tumbrel. Obama has gone “forward” all the way to the strategy of Walter Mondale.
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