"You can't lose heart"

It's pretty obvious we're dealing with two Obamas: White House Obama, who thinks his job is to make the repugs like him, and Campaign Obama, who remembers why we elected him.

They let Campaign Obama out to play this week, and he hit it out of the park in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday:

President Obama, seeking to avert potentially devastating losses for Democrats on Election Day, delivered an impassioned appeal to a cheering throng of college students here Tuesday night, telling them to “keep believing change is possible” and pleading, “You’ve got to stick with me, you can’t lose heart.”

In a 45-minute speech on a packed green in front of the library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mr. Obama reached back to the soaring rhetoric that carried him to the White House in 2008. The old-fashioned get-out-the-vote rally, in a brisk wind under gray skies, seemed to energize the president as much as the crowd.

“Change is going to come for this generation — if we work for it, if we fight for it, if we believe in it!” Mr. Obama thundered. “The biggest mistake we can make is to let disappointment or frustration lead to apathy and indifference.”

The high-energy appearance, broadcast to 200 campuses around the country, was designed to stir memories of the final days of Mr. Obama’s presidential run, when more than 17,000 turned out to see him in this overwhelmingly liberal town.

No finger-wagging, no condescension, no hippie-punching. Just the man we thought we elected, come home.

Don't go back, Mr. President. Stay out on the trail as Campaign Obama every day for the next 34 days. Because that's what it's going to take.