Obama: 'It's still about hope'

Hope and change powered Barack Obama to the White House four years ago, but can he play the same gambit twice?

Conventional wisdom says no, given the fact that the US president is the steward of America's demoralized economic state, but Obama, setting off on a six-month trek to a new presidential election, begs to differ.

"If people ask you what this campaign is about, you tell them it's still about hope," Obama on Saturday told crowds chanting "four more years" in battleground states Ohio and Virginia.

"I still believe we are not as divided as our politics suggest," Obama said, in an echo of the 2004 Democratic convention speech which shot the then unknown Illinois lawmaker to prominence.

Obama, at the first official rallies of his bid for the second term that all presidents crave, injected some badly needed poetry and excitement back into his brand after three slogging years of governing.

The president showed again on Saturday he can still move core supporters, who left an arena buzzing.

The president seems bent on renewing the passion of 2008 in parts of his new stump speech,though other passages seemed to reflect an attempt by his campaign to throw out red meat to Democratic interest groups to see what works.

Before he bounded on stage, his campaign showed a video featuring Edith Childs, the elderly woman who inspired a tired Obama on a tough day in South Carolina four years ago and coined his chant "Fired, Up, Ready to Go!"

Both rallies went ahead on Saturday under banners reading "Ready to Go".

And Obama tried to duplicate the simple clarity of his previous campaign theme "Hope" with his new rallying cry "Forward".

His foes however dispute the idea that his campaign is powered by a positive stream of hope

In fact, many accuse the president of deliberately dividing Americans with crusades on issues like women's health for naked political gain.

And the Obama camp set the table for his debut swing with negative campaign ads, questioning millionaire Romney over his Swiss bank account and asking whether he would have had the moxie to kill Osama bin Laden.

Obama's hopeful rhetoric also masked a sharp critique of Romney and Republicans.

There are also questions whether Americans are still receptive to Obama's message of hope, after grim years of painful recovery from the deepest recession in decades and with unemployment nationwide at 8.1 percent.

Some 61 percent of those asked in a recent poll by CBS and the New York Times said they believed their country was on the wrong track.