Obama calls up Teddy Roosevelt for the charge

US President Teddy Roosevelt was one of the driving forces behind the building of the Panama Canal and today his memory could  play a role in the US presidential campaign

According to The Week columnist Alexander Cockburn, the doughty and pugnacious warrior has been called up to help ensure the re-election of President Barack Obama.

WHEN IN DOUBT, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It's article one in every Democratic president's playbook. TR was president from 1901 to 1909. He was manly, ranching in North Dakota, exploring the Amazon. He was a rabid imperialist, charging up San Jacinto Hill, sending the Great White Fleet round the world. He loved wilderness, suitably shorn of Indians, whom he didn't care for. "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians," he wrote in The Winning of the West, "but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

When necessary he could play the populist rabble-rouser's card, flaying the corporations, railing against "the malefactors of great wealth". But on TR's watch modern corporate America came of age.

LBJ loved TR for his toughness. Draft-dodging Bill Clinton invoked TR as his ideal. And now Obama has wheeled on TR as his role model in denouncing those destroying the supposed guarantee of the American Way, that every citizen gets a fair shake at making it into the safe harbour of "the middle class".
 Last month Obama did his own reprise on the Great White Fleet, opening a new US marine base in Australia and flexing his muscles at China.

Then on Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kansas where TR, attempting a political comeback in 1910, slagged corporate power for the benefit of his audience of 30,000 prairie populists, Obama told a crowd of 1,200: "At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement."

He went on: "There are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that's happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess."

Obama and his campaign advisers are betting that there won't be any excessive sniggering at the sight of a president thus blithely denying the prime feature of his conduct during the worst economic crisis in 70 years, which was to pick an economic team – Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers as his chief economic adviser – determined to head off any serious economic reform of precisely those institutions and practices that prompted the great crash of 2008.
 Obama could have played the populist card back at the start of August amid the Republicans' efforts to force savage cuts in the social safety net. But he blinked. Now, four months later, there's the Occupy Wall Street movement eager to remind Americans that in practice as opposed to rhetoric Obama has been a doughty protector of the one per cent. They heckled him fiercely in New Hampshire three weeks ago.
 But of course Republicans aren't going to be attacking Obama as the pawn of the bankers. They favour the script that designates him as a closet commie, scheming night and day to bring the most bloodthirsty scenarios of Karl Marx to fruition. So from their point of view the Osawatomie speech was vindication of all their most lurid charges.

Ever the trimmer, Obama was obviously aware that with this lunge into rhetorical populism he was exposing himself to just such charges. So amid his execrations against the Republicans for not supporting the Democrats' effort to extend the two per cent reduction in the payroll tax, he suddenly threw in a homage to deficit reduction, thus doing a mini-reprise on his collapse in August.

 The irony is that the continued reduction on the payroll tax Obama is campaigning for means that the Social Security fund is getting two per cent less. Even though the missing two per cent is supposedly meant to be replaced by money from elsewhere in the federal budget, the drop in Social Security revenues will allow those urging "reform" of Social Security – ie its eventual destruction – to claim ever more fiercely that the system is in budgetary crisis.

A new poll out of Iowa, scheduled to hold its Republican caucuses a month from now, shows Newt Gingrich now well ahead of Mitt Romney. Whatever his own many substantive flip-flops, Gingrich is certainly capable of making devastating fun of Obama's gyrations. After Osawatomie he swiftly designated Obama as President Food Stamp, thus highlighting Obama's failure to lower the unemployment rate significantly. It won't be hard for Gingrich to flip through Obama's speech and point out the contradictions.
 Obama at Osawatomie: "Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper." True – and Gingrich can point out that Democrats cheerfully voted through the trade pacts that allowed this to happen.

Final caution: careful how you bet on the outcome in Iowa. The New York Times, which in concert with CBS, conducted that recent Iowa poll, points out that only "30 per cent of likely caucus-goers say that they had been contacted by the Gingrich campaign, raising questions about his ability to identify his supporters and lure them to more than 1,600 precinct caucus locations on a winter night. By comparison, 60 per cent say that they have been contacted by the [Ron] Paul campaign and 47 per cent by the Romney campaign, underscoring a stealth operation that has been under way for months."

Thus far Gingrich is running a shoe-string operation. He'll have to weather possible adversity in Iowa and New Hampshire before getting to friendlier territory in South Carolina and Florida.