Obama mania: After four tough years, is the thrill still there? | NOLA ...

Four years ago, Jakarah Porter was so excited she could hardly stand it. She was a high-school senior in Mobile, Ala., who was about to cast her first vote in a presidential election, and it was going to be for Barack Obama, who would become the first African-American president.

"I was part of history," said Porter, the president of Dillard University's student body. "I felt so honored."

Four years later, Porter said she will vote for Obama again, but some of the magic is gone. Her enthusiasm has been tempered by the events of the past four years, most notably the sluggish economy.

"I can't say this election has been very electrifying," she said. "This time, a lot more is on the line. People want change. . . . History has been made, but changes are needed more than ever."

In 2008, "the psyche of the nation was different," said Silas Lee, a sociology professor at Xavier University and a veteran pollster.

"People welcomed a breath of fresh air (and) optimism" in 2008, he said. "In 2012, it's about survival."

If the economic situation is marginally better than it was four years ago, it hasn't improved much. "People feel very vulnerable," Lee said. "This is the anxiety electorate."

While Obama is still expected to poll well with young voters - even if they're less electrified than they were four years ago - plenty of young people think it's time for a change. One of them is York Forsyth, president of the College Republicans at the University of New Orleans. He likened the United States to a football team with two quarterbacks.

"We have another quarterback; his name is Mitt Romney," said Forsyth, who is working on a doctorate in political science. "I'd like to put him in and give him a chance."

In addition to dissatisfaction with the slow economic recovery, much of the reason for the diminished excitement among Obama partisans is that he is an incumbent who has had to deal with the rough-and-tumble that is part of governing, Lee said. The sometimes-gauzy vision of the future that the campaigner Obama sketched - which 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin memorably skewered as "that hopey-changey stuff" - hasn't all come to fruition.

As former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo once put it: "You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose."

Not that it's all the president's fault. Obama has spent much of his first term tussling with Republicans on Capitol Hill, who won control of the House of Representatives in 2010. In the Senate, the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said his top goal was to ensure that Obama will be a one-term president.

Part of what is happening is the natural cycle of politics, in which torrid honeymoons devolve into dull marriages. "The bloom is off the rose" as far as attitudes toward Obama are concerned, said Edward Chervenak, an assistant professor of political science at UNO.

Lee offered a different analogy. "When someone's new on the scene, it's like having a new car," he said. "You're excited at first, but after four years in office . . . "

Being elected president "gives you a great title," Lee said, "but it means you have to get stuff through Congress. (Obama) isn't a magician, and I think some people thought he was a magician who could walk on water."

Over four years, the reverential view some voters had of Obama "has perhaps dimmed, but it hasn't gone out," Xavier University President Norman Francis said.

The "wow" factor was something that Melissa Harris-Perry, a political-science professor at Tulane University with a political talk show on MSNBC, said she never bought into.

"The election of a black man in America was supposed to create some kind of magical response," said Harris-Perry, who is African-American. "Those weren't the expectations that black folks had. We had elected too many black mayors to think that (electing Obama) would end race injustice or solve problems."

One factor contributing to the lack of enthusiasm locally has nothing to do with partisan sentiments or the dimming of Obama's star. Louisiana, which has only eight electoral votes, has received no significant attention from either presidential campaign, unlike such hotly contested, electoral-vote-rich states as Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.

Because Romney is expected to carry the state handily, there is a feeling among some Louisianians that their votes for Obama won't matter. Still, that was true four years ago as well, and local campuses then were radiating excitement about the election.

Louisiana's non-competitive status was one reason Anthony Kiper, a junior at UNO, gave for sitting out the 2008 election.

But since then, Kiper said he has been paying attention to news and reading up on issues, and he plans to vote Tuesday, even though Louisiana's electoral votes are no more in play this year than they were four years ago.

"Excitement is instilled deep inside me," he said.

Given the absence of presidential electioneering in New Orleans, politically engaged college students are working on campaigns in states where the race looks tight, either door-to-door or by telephone, in an effort to get people to vote.

Richard Riles, a member of College Democrats at UNO, was part of a local contingent that went to the Florida Panhandle this weekend to knock on doors.

"I'm not so much excited as anxious that Romney could win," said Riles, for whom this was the second campaign-related trip to the Sunshine State.

At UNO, members of the College Republicans chapter are joining other young Republicans from around the country in using their smartphones to call voters in states such as Florida and Ohio, Forsyth said.

"On our side of the aisle, I see more excitement," he said. "I think we conservative voters are way more fired up than we were in the last election."

Because Romney is viewed to have a lock on Louisiana, the state's Republicans are sending money to bolster the party's efforts in states such as Ohio and Florida, said Roger Villere, the GOP's Louisiana chairman.

"People are ready for a new president," he said. "I do run with a partisan crowd, but I also run with people in the community. . . . They feel we need a new direction."

Regardless of whether they lean left or right, "people always hold out hope for a better tomorrow," Lee said. "That's the good thing."

But, he added, today's Americans have "this unfortunate Internet mentality ... where people expect change right away. ... No matter who wins, he can't go in there and wave a magic wand and create thousands of jobs."

Source: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/11/obama_mania_after_four_tough_y.html

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