After the midterm mauling, is the real President Obama finally standing up?

Dan Roberts in Washington

Sunday 30 November 2014 10.15 EST

The exhausted-looking president who appeared before reporters after his party lost control of the Senate was determined not to give them a word to replace “shellacking”, the infamous soundbite he provided when Democrats were similarly polished off in the House of Representatives during 2010.

“It doesn’t make me mopey,” Barack Obama insisted at the post-election press conference, in the East Room of the White House four weeks ago. “(This result) energises me because it means that this democracy is working. People in America were restless.”

But the presidential energy was hard to see at first. Obama’s rumpled body language spoke of 2,114 days in office clearly weighing on frustrated shoulders. For a while, “mopey” appeared to be an entirely appropriate update on “shellacked”.

...

Within a blistering few days, the new Obama infuriated Republicans by granting legal status to 5 million undocumented immigrants; announced a historic deal with China over climate change; and defied powerful corporate interests by ruling that the internet should be kept universally available, under so-called “net neutrality” rules.

From the wreckage of his party’s defeat, a president appears to have been reborn. This is a president who bears much more in common with the firebrand elected in 2008 on a message of hope and change than the frustrated figure who had governed ever since.

full: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/30/midterm-mauling-real-president-obama-finally-standing-up