Obama's '08 rhetoric backfires

Barack Obama’s crusade against political apathy, which helped drive voters to the polls in 2008, is backfiring four years later as Americans grow increasingly frustrated with the sputtering economy and gridlock in Washington.

Several weeks after he announced his bid for the presidency in 2007, Obama ordered a mostly black crowd in Selma, Ala., to “get off the couch” because “we have too many children in poverty in this country and everybody should be ashamed.”