I’ve always liked candidate Obama better than President Obama, so to see him back out on the campaign trail was almost to fall back in love.

There he was in Cleveland on Thursday rallying the troops and depicting “two fundamentally different visions” of how to get the economy going: his own, what he called the traditional consensus view that the government has a positive role to play, versus that of “Mr. Romney and the current Republican Congress.”

They’ve rejected his view, Obama said, “in favor of a no-holds-barred government-is-the-enemy, market-is-everything approach.”

Obama is certainly right about that.

And he landed a solid punch when he said, “I don’t believe that giving someone like Mr. Romney another huge tax cut is worth ending the guarantee of basic security we’ve always provided the elderly and the sick and those who are looking for work.”

And when he announced that he was not going to deport children who immigrated here without proper documentation, I applauded.

But then Obama bragged about approving fewer regulations than even George W. Bush and about reducing “our yearly domestic spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy in nearly 60 years.”

These are essentially Republican policies.

And he hinted once more that he was open to a “grand bargain” with John Boehner that would reduce Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. So I’m guess I’m not falling back in love after all.

If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his story “Build Local Progressive Councils."

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