INDIANAPOLIS — For nearly two years, Barack Obama has made hope a chief selling point of his campaign for president. Now, unpredictably, national despair over the foundering economy has given new resonance to his message.
The Democratic nominee unveiled a sharpened theme Wednesday, evoking the nation's recovery from the Depression to suggest he offers America its best chance to overcome the economic crisis that has erupted worldwide.
"Listen here, Indiana," Obama told 20,000 supporters at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. "I'm here today to tell you that there are better days ahead."
The tumultuous economy, he told the crowd, is testing America "in a way that we haven't seen in nearly a century."
"Future generations will judge us by how we respond to this test," he said. "Will they say that this was a time when America lost its way, when it lost its purpose? When we allowed our own petty differences, our broken politics to plunge this country into a dark and painful recession?
"Or will they say that this was another one of those moments when America overcame? When we battled back from adversity, when we recognized the common stake we have in each other's success? This is one of those moments, Indiana."
Since the start of his campaign, the Illinois senator has talked relentlessly of tax cuts and other relief for families hamstrung by the rising costs of gasoline, healthcare and college. But the message, absent a real-world sense of immediacy, never completely clicked.
Now, with job losses and home foreclosures mounting, with voters aghast at the colossal taxpayer bailout of Wall Street giants and tumbling stock prices that have diminished their retirement savings, it is all too immediate.
Obama's recasting of his rhetoric on the economy combines a sober assessment of the tasks ahead, ones unimaginable when his campaign began, with the brand of optimism that fueled his candidacy from the start.
Not incidentally, it echoed the tough-minded optimism employed by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Bill Clinton in 1992. Both used a gift for pairing optimism and empathy to great success in their election campaigns.
On Wednesday, Obama wryly invoked Reagan at the fairgrounds.
"Back in 1980, Ronald Reagan asked the electorate whether you were better off than you were four years ago," he told supporters. "At the pace things are going right now, you're going to have to ask whether you're better off than you were four weeks ago."
