Can Obama Make History Again?

President Obama greets diners in Los Angeles last month. He faces long odds in his quest for re-election. Among them: unemployment, eroding support among independent voters and approval ratings that are well below those of previous presidents who won a second term.

GUY RAZ, host: As of today, we're now a year away from the 2012 presidential election. Barack Obama won the White House with his message of hope and change. Now, with unemployment at 9 percent, he's struggling. In an acknowledgment that the president's team has been ineffective at times, senior aid, Pete Rouse, will take over some of Chief of Staff Bill Daley's management duties. NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson, reports on the daunting challenges the president faces on his road to reelection.

MARA LIASSON: Three years ago, the state of Virginia flipped. It voted for George W. Bush in 2004, but in 2008, it went for Barack Obama, with the help of independent voters like Emily Perri. But as Perri cast her ballot in local elections in Fairfax this morning, she wasn't so sure she would vote for the president again.

EMILY PERRI: I'm not entirely positive, you know, another four years will help improve things or not under Obama.

LIASSON: And that sums up the problem for the president. His support among independents has collapsed. His overall approval ratings are well below those of other presidents who went on to win a second term. Unemployment is expected to stay near 9 percent until Election Day and consumer confidence is now as low as it was in 1980 and 1991, the last two times an incumbent president lost. The historical precedents are all so negative, the New York Times ran an article this weekend headlined "Is Obama Toast?"

Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman and a veteran political strategist, says the president's challenges are daunting but not insurmountable.

TOM DAVIS: It's certainly not the environment that he faced three years ago, but a year is an eternity in this business. I think, you know, clearly they've got to improve the economy, or at least give people the feeling that things are getting better, that they have a plan, and the Republicans, you know, won't let them implement it. But that's tough, although, you know, campaigns matter.

LIASSON: Campaigns do matter, and the Obama team ran a great one in 2008. Now, their challenge is to reassemble the pieces in an inhospitable political environment.

BEN LABOLT: We're the first presidential re-election campaign in history where our organization didn't go away when the president came into office.

LIASSON: Ben Labolt is the press secretary for the Obama campaign.

LABOLT: We maintained our organization throughout the administration through Organizing for America. Now, the next phase of that effort is expanding the organization, reconnecting, not only with former supporters from 2008, but also expanding the electorate, registering new voters, finding new Obama supporters.

LIASSON: In 2008, Obama's victory was built on those expansion voters, millions of young people and minorities voting for the first time. But it will be harder to re-energize them next year, now that the euphoria of the first Obama crusade is a faded memory.

This past weekend, the Obama campaign began its one-year countdown by holding 2,100 grassroots events around the country. Jeremy Bird, the campaign's field director, says they were registering voters, signing up volunteers and...

JEREMY BIRD: We opened offices in the last couple of days in Henderson, Nevada; Fort Collins, Colorado; St. Louis, Missouri; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Ann Arbor, Michigan; two locations in Milwaukee; Madison, Green Bay, Waukesha and Kenosha are today...

LIASSON: You get the idea. This time around, despite a political landscape tilted against them, the Obama campaign does retain some advantages. They have the money to be competitive everywhere and, with no primary challenge, they have the time to set up an organization around the country.

Of course, the fabled Obama grassroots team wasn't able to protect Democrats from a historic loss in the 2010 midterm elections. But Bird is convinced that next year, it will be easier to turn out those expansion voters, because the electorate will be younger, browner and more Obama-friendly than it was in 2010. And...

BIRD: He wasn't on the ballot in 2010, and, you know, we have just a completely different program with him on the ballot. So it'll just be a vastly different election and different conversations that we'll be having with voters from here until Election Day.

LIASSON: And the president himself is having a different, much more sober conversation with his supporters. At fundraisers, he reminds them that instead of riding a wave, they'll have to grind it out. And in this campaign video, he tries to rekindle their enthusiasm.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: That's really what this election's gonna come down to, whether we'll come together to finish the work we've started, or sit back and watch as the progress we've made gets rolled back.

LIASSON: Barack Obama made history in 2008. In order to get re-elected in 2012, he'll have to defy the odds and make history again. Mara Liasson, NPR News, Washington.

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