Bad Barack gets the best of Good Barack - again!

Wednesday, April 15th 2009, 4:00 AM

Anybody who watched the President's economic speech yesterday saw the battle of the two Obamas. Good Barack and Bad Barack were struggling for control, with the former demonstrating his charismatic appeal and the latter revealing a bad habit of distorting the views of critics.

The chip on his shoulder about wealth is still there, too, a timely reminder that April 15 could mean an unhappy return for millions of Americans in coming years.

Savvy investors might want to buy tea bags, with tax protests likely to be a regular feature in a Bad Barack era.

But first came the Good Barack, who is the greatest communicator in modern political history and he proved it again. His opening summary of how we crashed was a lesson on how to tell a complicated story in accessible, clear and concise terms.

In five paragraphs, or about three minutes, he outlined the housing bubble, spreading blame on bankers, borrowers, rating agencies and Washington. He took a rare swipe at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those Democratic strongholds that helped fuel the bubble and whose collapse was central to the mortgage freeze.

"Greed gave way to fear," Obama said, ending the section by linking the problems on Wall Street to the rest of America and then smoothly hopscotching to the global crisis.

But Bad Barack was never far away, popping up with class-warfare code words - "profits" being a main one, as though the very concept of capitalism is fundamentally dirty. He sneered at "those who can manipulate numbers," a self-conscious-sounding insult from a man often accused of manipulating words.

On that point, there were at least seven times where Obama disingenuously characterized any disagreement as either ignorant or politically motivated.

"Some have accused us" and "some have argued" were his stock phrases for setting up the straw men of opposition. By pretending there are an equal number of critics who think he is doing too much with those who think he is doing too little, he portrayed himself as a man in the middle whose every idea is mainstream and reasonable.

That's a nonstarter, as he seemed to acknowledge toward the end when he said, "I know there is a criticism out there that my administration has somehow been spending with reckless abandon, pushing a liberal social agenda while mortgaging our children's future."

He's guilty as charged, and it might have been the most politically honest moment of the speech. Unfortunately, he quickly followed with an attack on the nonexistent faction that says government should only cut spending, then added a thin gruel of facts and fantasy to justify his distinctly liberal agenda.

Of course, all spending in his plans are either "investment" or "reform" that "we so desperately need to generate long-term prosperity." In this fantasy, his proposed $674 billion fund for universal health care will actually cut entitlement costs.

Talk of the rising deficit, which will more than double this year, was the cue for another straw man to appear, one who supposedly suggests the budget can be balanced by "trimming a few earmarks or cutting the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts."

That was my cue to give up. Bad Barack had prevailed, turning what had been a promising start into yet another divisive ending.

The President who never misses an opportunity to talk of uniting the world invariably manages to paint himself into a partisan corner at home. Apparently believing liberals have a monopoly on wisdom and virtue, he has yet to approach a domestic problem in ways that will produce a broad-based consensus.

One-party rule gives him the votes, but it will never give him national unity. Nor, in the real world, will it give him all the answers to America's problems.

mgoodwin@nydailynews.com