Rubik’s Cube of Re-elections

So, “The One” wants a Round Two.

This week President Obama made it official that he’s seeking a second turn. Make no mistake, that’s going to be hard.

In the prologue to “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” No more.

His tabula rasa days are gone. He now reflects fears and frustrations.

Differing factions now take a peephole view of the president’s performance — viewing him narrowly over whether he has performed as promised, or as expected, on the issue most important to them. The broader record, especially when weighed against the alternative, is virtually ignored.

For some, change has not come fast enough, if at all, or it has been change for the worse, and hope has slowly melted away. To those unhappy on the left, he’s a corporatist, war-waging, pusillanimous pushover who is silver-tongued and rubber-spined. To those who most oppose him on the right, he is a Socialist, spendthrift, republic-destroyer who is unfit, unqualified and literally, by way of his “Kenyan birth,” ineligible to be president.

He is held down by two afflictions of modern American politics: transitory memory and mercurial temper. So Obama’s best chances of winning re-election may well hinge on his ability to re-energize and engage two of his largest, strongest groups of supporters who have mostly avoided the negative labeling: blacks and Hispanics. But that won’t necessarily be easy either.

On Wednesday, President Obama delivered his first major speech after signaling his bid for re-election. It was to the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. The next day, Gallup released a poll showing that in March, Obama’s approval rating among blacks had reached a personal low. (But, at 85 percent, it is still extraordinary.)

The same poll found that his approval rating among Hispanics dropped to 54 percent in March, matching a personal low. That is down more than a quarter from March of 2009 when it was 73 percent. Many are still understandably smarting over Obama’s broken promise to introduce comprehensive immigration reform in his first year. Meanwhile, he has presided over a record number of deportations of undocumented workers.

Last week, National Journal published a fascinating analysis that predicted that Obama would have to win about the same amount of, or more of, the white vote in states like Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia if his support among minorities dropped by just 10 percent. That’s problematic on both counts. Obama’s approval among whites remains below 40 percent. (He won 43 percent of the white vote in 2008.) And if present trends continue, his support among minorities could be off by much more than 10 percent.

Obama must do the hard work of finding the right balance and combination with each of these groups.  It’s like the Rubik’s Cube of re-elections.