Can Obama reverse the tide?

The president is speaking like a Democrat. And he sounds pretty good.

Robert Shrum

Written off for November. Bad polls and bleak news even in usually reliable blue states. Among the herd of prognosticators and analysts, an overwhelming consensus for a GOP takeover. To borrow the recent verdict of the Associated Press, “Time has all but run out for [the president] and his party.”

But what this also describes isn’t recent. The time was 1948 and the president was Harry Truman. It was 1 a.m. when he addressed a dispirited Democratic convention, where the panic was almost palpable: Do we really have to run with this guy?

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Robert Shrum has been a senior adviser to the Gore 2000 presidential campaign, the campaign of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and the British Labour Party. In addition to being the chief strategist for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign, Shrum has advised thirty winning U.S. Senate campaigns; eight winning campaigns for governor; mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities; and the Democratic Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Shrum's writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, and other publications. The author of No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner (Simon and Schuster), he is currently a Senior Fellow at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service.