Obama 2.0: Tougher and Ready to Change the Game?

The second year of the Obama Era is young, but we may be seeing the emergence of Obama 2.0 — a president willing to do battle against the dark forces of stasis and negativity.

Obama 1.0 didn’t want to get ahead of Congress. Obama 2.0 appears ready to go head-to-head with Democrats who have the numbers to lead but lack the discipline, and Republicans whose only big idea is to make Democrats fail — a job that has turned out to be pretty easy so far.

Now, the president seems open to strategy change, and he’s being flooded with fresh advice.

In the new issue of TIME, for example, columnist Mark Halperin suggests that Obama “borrow from the playbook of Ronald Reagan” by becoming bigger than life, standing for a few big things and striking themes with which no self-respecting American patriot — Republican, Democrat or Tea Person — can disagree.

Halperin is correct. Obama 1.0 worked at playing the Washington game; Obama 2.0 must prove he can change the game, as he promised in the campaign. He should lead us in a tectonic shift from the politics of fear to the politics of hope.

The Right claims we are losing the America we love. The Left tells us we are teetering on the brink of environmental collapse. Both tell us we should be very afraid. A little fear is good. It teaches us, metaphorically speaking, not to touch the hot pot on the stove. But fear without hope leads to the kind of persistent polarity, political paralysis and apocalypse fatigue that seems to be infecting the American spirit like a pandemic.

As evangelists of hope like to point out, Martin Luther King told us about a dream, not a nightmare. When President Reagan accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president, he talked of a “shining city on a hill”, not a collapsed civilization. Just before taking office in 1961, back in the day when masculine pronouns were still politically correct, John Kennedy invoked the same image, saying:

Today, the eyes of all people are truly upon us – and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill – constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities.

If I were advising President Obama on the big populist ideas that should be the themes for his second year in office, I would recommend he begin a new national conversation about the future – not just the future we must avoid, but also the future we must build. He talks often about the “new energy economy”. It’s the right goal, but TWTS — Too Wonkish To Sizzle in the popular imagination. Instead, on his next visit to the bully pulpit, Obama 2.0 might say:

We challenge the world’s biggest economies to a “Race to the Top.”

By 2020, the United States will be the most resource efficient, innovative, self-sufficient and environmentally responsible economy on the planet.

Again, the president has come close, without quite firing the starting pistol. In his State of the Union address, he said:

There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains, or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products. … China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. … They’re making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.

Since China is already in full sprint, let’s make the race official. Let’s throw down the challenge and identify the finish line.

Just by participating, we will become a more secure and genuinely prosperous nation. We all know the benefits of weaning ourselves from carbon-intensive fuels — particularly imported oil: We’ll plug some of the biggest leaks in our economy, clean the air, free ourselves from other nations that don’t have our best interests at heart, eliminate the temptation to meddle in parts of the world where we are not welcome, undermine Osama bin Laden’s influence by taking away some of his best recruiting arguments, and eliminate the need to send our sons and daughters to kill and be killed in oil wars.

In the future we want, Obama 2.0 might say: