Time Running Out for Obama To 'Re-Engage' and 'Re-Excite' Voters
Tejinder Singh

Washiington, DC

Time flies and as 2011 runs to the finishing line, the political parties in the United States are staring at another year of massive campaign fund raising, catchy slogans and hectic efforts to swing voters on the fence to vote for elephants or donkeys.

The presidential election of 2008 saw first-time Sen. Barack H. Obama riding a wave of anti-war sentiment against then-president George W. Bush. Now the stakes have changed. In 2012 incumbent Obama will be judged on his four years in office.

With the global economy, especially the American financial scenario, in doldrums with unemployment rates stubbornly staying above 9 percent, Obama knows re-election will be hard based on his presidential fiscal record.

In his weekly radio message on Saturday, the president asked Republicans to identify what they like and what they don't like about his proposed $447 billion jobs bill so there can be bipartisan agreement on a plan to put people back to work.

Obama is even struggling to rope in his own party lawmakers to help him tide over this fiscal debacle, as his oft-repeated calls for bipartisan moves have fallen on the intentionally deaf ears of lawmakers.

Earlier, at a DNC fund raiser organized at a private home in Washington DC, President Obama recalled, "we argued in 2008 -- and we captured I think the imaginations of a lot of people -- that we could bring about some fundamental change if we got past some of the partisan rancor and the constant politicking that had come to characterize Washington."

Today's Republican Party is being held hostage by a small number of Tea Party zealots and that is the underlying reason why there is no bipartisan agreement, bringing out the frustration we see in Obama as he faces the failure to bring "fundamental change" that he promised in 2008.

On the fight against terrorism, Obama is slowly but steadily decapitating terrorist organizations, most notably al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in May and the eloquent American-born jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki on Sept. 29.

Al-Awlaki, targeted in a U.S. drone attack, is said by intelligence agencies to have had a "significant operational role" in recent terrorist plots, especially two nearly catastrophic attacks on U.S.-bound planes--an airliner on Christmas 2009 and cargo planes last year.

Commander-in-Chief Obama is going ahead with promised drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan and can claim credit for supporting democratic uprisings in the Arab world and for negotiating a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia.

Negativity makes news and gets attention, hence we see Republicans harping on concerns that Obama has failed to achieve success in securing peace between Israelis and the Palestinians.

Although President Obama's re-election campaign put a feather in its cap with the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," a policy change in the military after nearly 18 years, political pundits are skeptical of how many gays and lesbians will actually go out and vote for Obama in 2012.

"We got people engaged and excited in 2008. We've got to re-engage them and re-excite them in 2012," Obama told a Democratic National Committee event in the national capital on the last day of September.

The question that remains to be answered is: How?

If Obama and his team can "re-engage" and "re-excite" the people in 2012, he will get another term to take Americans a bit more down the road of domestic prosperity, equality at home and respect in global arena.