Obama's Comeback

Presidents can't afford the luxury of getting depressed, so here we have Mr. Audacity of Hope right after the Scott Brown newsshock being handed a football helmet in a sports equipment factory and telling crowds that he can handle the pummeling.

“So long as I have some breath in me," he vows in an upbeat Ohio talk using "fight" as a mantra, "so long as I have the privilege of serving as your president, I will not stop fighting for you. I will take my lumps. But I won’t stop fighting."

In a run of media misfortunes from the "systemic failure" to detect a would-be airline bomber to a surge of voter anger in the contest for Ted Kennedy's seat, the media narrative and opinion polls have been running downhill for Barack Obama but, with the State of the Union coming next week, the stage is set to mount a comeback for a president whose resilience is a strong point.

Unlike LBJ after the country turned against the Vietnam War, Nixon during Watergate and Jimmy Carter in his "national malaise" funk, Obama has shown he is unlikely to let a run of setbacks get him down, and he seems to have enough political momentum to buoy him.

In a new Gallup Poll showing the majority of Americans want to slow down health care reform, he nonetheless retains considerable personal confidence. "Given Obama's job approval rating of roughly 50 per cent," Gallup says, "clearly some Americans who express disappointment with the president's lack of progress still generally approve of the job he is doing."

With this residue of good will after a rocky first year, the President's comeback will require substance as well as style, action beyond rhetoric, and there are encouraging signs that he is making the needed changes.

In the Obama attacks on Wall Street this week, there is a clear indication that he has reached the end of the line with Geithner-Summers appeasement and is going in the direction that Paul Volcker recommended a year ago, tougher regulation and more pressure for reform of the financial industry.

In his weekly address today, he takes on the Supreme Court decision this week to allow corporations to spend more on political advertising, calling it "devastating to the public interest" and vowing to push new legislation to counter it: "The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections."

As he showed during campaign onslaught over the Jeremiah Wright rants, Barack Obama has a gift for taking temporary setbacks, separating himself from them, putting them into a larger context and moving on.

This time, he will have to scale an even higher mountain of carping, marked by such excrescences as Conservative elder statesman Pat Buchanan's argument that he has "lost White America." As Buchanan and others on the Hard Right lose their marbles over the prospect of a Democratic downfall, Barack Obama will have to show Americans how much fight there really is in a cool and conciliatory president.