Obama's new challenge: Disappointment

The watchword of the Republican National Convention in Tampa was disappointment — as in President Barack Obama has been one.
You can hammer Obama on health care. Mock his golf outings. Demand to see his birth certificate and Harvard transcript, and call him a European socialist bent on turning the American Dream into a Belgian nightmare. He’ll throw his head back and laugh at you like a Bond villain.

But tell voters he’s not the man America fell in love with in 2008 — and pine, however disingenuously, about his unfulfilled potential — and a shiver runs through his Chicago campaign headquarters. Obama’s team was spinning the convention as a complete miss, arguing that Republicans didn’t lay a glove on their man. Yet what emerged from Tampa was a subtle, clever shift in GOP messaging, a much more dangerous strategy for Obama than the kitchen-sink attacks that preceded the gathering. Republicans posed — rhetorically — as Obama 2008 voters, lamenting his unfulfilled expectations as if they had been with him all along instead of trying to block him at every turn.
Both sides recognize the power of the disappointment theme: that the hope Obama offered for mending the economy, transforming the political process and even saving the earth has faded.

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