The odd couple: Barack Obama and Karl Rove

Last month, the president’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, outlined five electoral paths that could yield the 270 electoral votes Obama needs. Two of those paths probably rely on a time machine or Newt Gingrich; one other hinges on an Obama sweep of the Rust Belt; but two more envision a new coalition that marries Western states full of ex-Californians to the coastal Democratic bastions. The politics of the pipeline tell us the latter pair of paths are the ones Messina and Axelrod are actually pursuing; they’re headed West.

Since he struggled with Hillary Clinton in the spring of 2008, Obama’s relationship has been the rockiest with one stalwart member of the Democratic political family — the white, blue-collar worker. Personified, this voter is the back-slapping brother-in-law who’s never quite warmed to the Ivy League stiff across the Thanksgiving table.

As president, Obama has done little tangibly to heal this rift, settling for class warfare as relational duct tape. Keystone’s politics makes that tougher, as the shale gas boom has made blue-collar Democrats in Ohio and Pennsylvania more focused on the real-world risk of academic environmentalism. But it’s not those voters Obama likely has in mind; he’s writing them off to focus on the organic grocery shopper in Denver’s suburbs.

The man who once lamented the intentional division of Americans along party lines is now choosing one part of his own party’s historic base over the other, and accepting economic failure in the bargain.

In 2004, Obama was perhaps what he — and America — wanted him to be. Today, a mirror-imaged Obama stands for re-election as the typical partisan he has become.

President Obama owes Karl Rove an apology.

Brad Todd, a founding partner of OnMessage Inc., created advertising in 2010 for Republicans including Sen. Ron Johnson and Gov. Rick Scott and he led the Republican National Committee’s 2008 Presidential independent expenditure.