NYT: A Campaign Challenge: Defining Obama

[steve2470]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/us/politics/07campaign.html?google_editors_picks=true

LOS ANGELES — President Obama may have escaped the burden of a Democratic primary challenger. Yet the battle to define him is rapidly escalating — not only by Republicans competing to run against him, but also within his own team inside the White House.

A Republican presidential debate on Wednesday, followed by the president’s economic address to Congress on Thursday, offers a window into the dueling efforts to provide voters a view of Mr. Obama and his record at a time when polling shows that he is increasingly vulnerable politically and that Americans feel the country is careering down the wrong track.

The White House is in the midst of rebranding the president as a pragmatic problem solver prepared to set aside ideology to address a compelling need (see last week’s concession on ozone regulations), a reasonable man in an era dominated by extreme views. But they also emphasize that he is willing to draw distinctions with conservatives, reflecting a central tension that has defined him as a candidate and as president: that in trying to lay claim to a broad swath of the electorate, as he succeeded in doing in 2008, he risks pleasing neither the center nor the left, the story of much of his time in office.

The Republican candidates, collectively and in distinctive ways, continue to cast him as the foil against whom they ran so successfully in 2010: a big-government liberal who has expanded regulations, created uncertainty for business and failed to revive the economy, with millions more Americans out of work than when he took office. They portray him as an unsteady leader who is unequipped to turn around a country in economic crisis.

[Skittles]

1. "prepared to set aside ideology"

that's his PROBLEM :thumbsdown:

[BeyondGeography]

2. How is this rebranding?

:shrug:

That's what he has been all along and it hasn't worked politically or otherwise.