Analysis: Barack Obama the underdog

Extract from The Times (UK), 28 January 2010

By Giles Whittell in Washington

Barack Obama has had to come down from the Olympian heights to recast himself as a street fighter, even an underdog - and he did it well.

His political task last night was to gloss over a thin record of accomplishment and chart a course towards midterm elections in November that a deeply demoralised Democratic party is starting to dread.

He admitted he and his team had made mistakes in their first year even if most of the errors were left unspecified other than a failure to communicate his aims for health reform.

But he did not abandon his big goals on health, financial reform or climate change and made the Republicans look like the party of "no".

And the key line from the speech was one of defiance: "We do not give up. We do not quit. We don’t allow fear or division to break our spirit.”

Few of his supporters would have forecast such a shrunken agenda a year ago, when Mr Obama’s sweeping promises of change still seemed equal to the monumental challenges posed by a collapsing economy. Since then recovery has been sluggish, unemployment has been stuck at 10 per cent and Republican efforts to sabotage health, financial and energy legislation have been relentless.

But aides said Mr Obama had lost none of his ambition and still planned to change the way Washington does business – but in reality he is more dependent than ever on the 535 members of Congress who crammed into the House of Representatives last night.

Read the article in full here.