Obama Uses Nostalgia on His Last Campaign
I’ll be master of the obvious here: This type of campaigning would not work if President Obama didn’t really have tons of shared experiences with everyday Americans while his opponent shared days with the elite and insulated. The closest Mitt Romney came to shared experiences with everyday Americans was pulling “pranks” on them during his college days when being the governor’s son probably prevented some consequences that ordinary Americans would not have escaped if they’d done the same.
The president’s re-election campaign increasingly is sounding like a nostalgia tour. His speeches stroll through elections past, serving up fond memories of his days running as a political unknown, identifying early political inspirations and reminding voters that, win or lose, this will be his last campaign after 13 appearances on the ballot since 1996.
“I’m term-limited,” he tells crowds — a flat statement of the obvious that always gets a laugh. “You get a little nostalgic and you start thinking about your first political campaigns.”
These are not the casual ad-libs of a candidate suddenly turning wistful, but a rhetorical device designed to transport Obama back to the days when he was the kind of ordinary guy voters felt they could relate to, long before he rode in limousines and flew on Air Force One.
“Sometimes I couldn’t find a parking spot and so I’d end up being late, and if it was raining I’d have to fumble with my umbrella and I’d come in kind of drenched,” Obama told a crowd in Oakland, Calif., earlier this week.
“There were these things called maps, because we did not have GPS,” he told a chuckling crowd in Portland, Ore., the next day. “And they were on paper, and you’d have to fold them. You’d unfold them and then trying to fold them back was really difficult.”
The unwritten subtext: I’m just like you, and my policies flow from our shared experiences. Mitt Romney, he’s a rich guy whose policies would benefit the elite.
“It’s the silver-spoon-in-his-mouth attack — more gently insinuated,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert on political rhetoric and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.