President Barack Obama released the first ad of his 2012 re-election campaign yesterday, setting broad themes for the campaign.

The ad focuses on four big E’s: energy, environment, economy and ethics. Those four areas are central to our nation’s well-being, and if Obama can stake claim to success in those four domains, he’ll win the election.

But, to win debates in those four areas, Obama needs to go beyond positioning himself at the center of public opinion. He needs to do what Republicans have been so successful at: He needs to drive public opinion.

Energy and the Environment

The president’s first ad of 2012 positions him as having reduced dependence on foreign oil and created millions of clean energy jobs.

I applaud the president’s leadership in promoting renewable energy sources and encouraging energy efficiency, but he needs to go further – both in policy and in rhetoric.

Energy efficiency standards (like the 54.5 miles per gallon cars will average by 2025) are great, and we need more. Likewise, investment in renewable energy is critical.

But beyond securing extra funding for renewable energy research, Obama needs to convince voters of the threat posed by climate change and other environmental problems, and of the role technological leadership in clean energy will play in our future economic prosperity.

Specifically, the ad comes just after the administration rejected a permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would have been a climate disaster.

But the administration failed to make that case, instead squabbling over its particular route and the GOP’s effort to rush approval of the permit. If the administration can’t frame the pipeline debate in terms of its disastrous environmental – and hence economic – consequences, the Republicans will frame it as liberal elitists killing jobs, and that will kill his campaign.

The good news for Obama is that the public is already overwhelmingly on his side. Two-thirds of Americans want a big effort made to reduce carbon emissions, even if it has serious or moderate economic effects.

On many issues, public opinion lines up with Democratic positions. Taking action on climate change can win elections for Democrats, if they have the fortitude to stand by it.

Economy

The economy, of course, will be the central issue of the campaign.

As we move into 2012, the economy is in bad shape, but it is better now than it was when Obama took office.

The recession reached its depth during President George W. Bush’s final quarter in office. Since then, the trend has reversed; we’ve just had nine straight quarters of economic growth.

Many talking heads forecasted the downfall of the Obama campaign based on the current 8.5 percent unemployment rate.

They point to the fact that no president in the last 75 years has been reelected with unemployment above 7.2 percent. That may be misleading, though.

In 1984, Reagan was reelected with unemployment at 7.2 percent, and he was elected by a huge margin, suggesting that his campaign could have withstood higher unemployment.

More telling is Roosevelt’s re-election. Roosevelt took office in 1933, at the peak of the Great Depression, when unemployment was 19.8 percent. By 1936, unemployment had dropped to 16.6 percent – still staggeringly high, but the trend of recovery was enough to convince the voters to stick with the guy who had got things going in the right direction.

Obama’s situation is similar. When the Great Recession officially ended in summer 2009, unemployment was approaching 10 percent. The most recent figure has it down to 8.5 percent after several years of consistent – if slow – jobs growth.

Ethics

Ethics – specifically the influence of money on politics – is the cornerstone underlying all other political issues.

As long as Wall Street firms and huge energy corporations can threaten politicians with unlimited advertisement buys targeting them if they push policies that are against the company’s interests, meaningful change is all but impossible.

In 2008, Obama seemed inclined toward that sort of change. During his first presidential campaign, he pledged to ban lobbyist gifts to executive employees and to close the revolving door between government employees and contractors.

However, while upholding the ban on lobbyist gifts, he’s issued wavers to allow a number of former lobbyists to serve in his administration. He needs to go further.

On ethics and corruption, more than any other issue, the president needs to use his bully pulpit to convince us of the importance of reform.

The first line of the first advertisement of the campaign describes “secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama with ads fact checkers say are not tethered to the facts.”

Tying Republicans to big money is a piece of cake. If President Obama can convince the public that he would push for meaningful reform of money’s influence on our elections it would win him a tremendous amount of support, and it would help heal our democracy.