Get ready for a scrappier Obama

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White, working-class Americans were the last voters to jump on Barack Obama's bandwagon in 2008. Now, with the epochal Democratic defeat in a Massachusetts Senate race, they have become the first to bail on the newish President.

How Mr. Obama goes about trying to win them back will determine almost everything that happens in his mandate from this point on. After the inspirational candidate of 2008 and the careful pragmatist he became during his first year in office, Mr. Obama is now forced to assume an entirely new guise altogether, and it's not one that he comes by naturally.

Get ready for populist Obama. His presidency may depend on it.

Mr. Obama hardly lacks empathy. But he has a harder time expressing it than, say, Bill Clinton, the last Democratic emoter-in-chief.

Until now, Mr. Obama has run his administration like a graduate seminar. No point of view has been thought too marginal to be included in the discussion. Decisions are taken only after painstaking, and arguably excessive, deliberation.

There is much that is commendable in the rational approach. But for many voters, Mr. Obama's cool-headed style just comes off as elitist.

It took a crushing rebuke from voters in Massachusetts, where the late Ted Kennedy's seat swung decisively to the Republican candidate in Tuesday's special election, for Mr. Obama to finally clue in to that. "I think, you know, what [voters]ended up seeing is this feeling of remoteness and detachment, where there's these technocrats up here making decisions," Mr. Obama told ABC News on Wednesday, the first anniversary of his inauguration.

But can the candidate of change change himself?

"It's fine to be the person, behind closed doors, who wants to hear all opinions. Some Americans might even like that and see it as a welcome change from the Bush years," offered Dante Scala, an expert in presidential politics at the University of New Hampshire. "But does Mr. Obama have anything of Harry Truman in him? Is there something inside him that will allow him to hit the trail and give the opposition hell?"

Mr. Obama conceded in the ABC interview that he mistakenly assumed that if voters were offered methodical explanations of his policies, "then people will get it." But that view was based on the erroneous belief that most voters have the time and inclination to separate spin from substance in the hyperactive multimedia news universe.

When it comes to Mr. Obama's health-care reform, which would subsidize private insurance for low-income Americans currently without coverage, what most voters retain from the cacophony of "deliberation" in Congress is that they will end up paying higher taxes, that Obamacare won't bring costs under control and that it will lead to a reduction in both the quality and quantity of care offered to American seniors under Medicare, the federal public health plan for those over 65.

In Massachusetts, which has had legislation in place since 2006 that has provided a template for Mr. Obama's national health-care plan, voters see redundancy in Washington's meddling. For them, it's all cost and no benefit.

Nothing drove Massachusetts voters into the arms of Republican Scott Brown - not his centrefold looks, not his get-tough-on-terrorists stance, not his opponent's purported gaffes - more than the impression that Mr. Obama was fiddling with health care while the American economy burned.

Based on a breakdown of the vote, that sentiment was particularly pronounced among white, working-class voters. They were the last to abandon Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic primary race and rallied to Mr. Obama's presidential candidacy only after the economic meltdown that fall. But on Tuesday, they went Republican.

"If you look at where Hillary did especially well in the [Massachusetts]primary, that is where Scott Brown did well," Prof. Scala observed in an interview. "If there is an Achilles heel for Obama, it's that disconnect between his administration and white, working-class Americans - and you can throw in senior citizens."

The tactical challenge Mr. Obama now faces is winning them back, preferably in time for this fall's midterm congressional elections. Does he flush his health-care agenda down the toilet, or does he damn the torpedoes and push it through, possibly using an arcane procedural mechanism that would get around a Republican filibuster in the Senate? Even the experts in Washington have had to dust off their manuals in congressional procedure. No one knows if it could work.

The only way to salvage health-care reform now may be by taking on the insurance companies, or at least to be seen as taking them on. Mr. Obama initially tried to accommodate the insurance lobby so as to avoid mobilizing a deep-pocketed adversary. Now, working-class Americans may rally to the health-care cause only if Mr. Obama can convince them he really is their champion.

Mr. Obama adopted this newly populist pitch, albeit too late to make a difference, when he went to Massachusetts on Sunday in a desperate attempt to rescue Martha Coakley's Senate bid. "Bankers don't need another vote in the United States Senate. They've got plenty," the President told a Boston rally.

Defeat in the Bay State, normally about the bluest in the land, has made it even more urgent for Mr. Obama to turn up the volume. Next week's State of the Union address will likely reflect this new tone.

"He is temperamentally cool, but you're going to see someone much more aggressive in dealing with his adversaries - Wall Street and the Republicans," Thomas Mann, a noted congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview. "We're going to learn something about his mettle."

No one knows yet whether Barack Obama can convincingly play the populist scrapper. But his own tactical errors during the first year of his presidency have left him no option but to try.