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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!" | 
