Face it: the general-election campaign is under way. Rick Santorum has disappeared, and Newt Gingrich is still politically dead. With the Republican nomination wrapped up, Mitt Romney has dropped the severe conservatism, stopped denouncing the children of illegal immigrants, and started claiming authorship of the auto-bailout plan, which he had formerly dismissed as a goodbye kiss to the industry. By Election Day, he will have replaced so many parts so many times that nothing of the original Romney will be left but the hair.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign has released a seven-minute video called “Forward,” which lists the President’s achievements in a dramatic montage (“Iraq War Ended . . . Libya Liberated . . . Osama bin Laden Dead . . . Unemployment Benefits Extended . . . Health Care Reform Passed”). Two things about the video are striking. It shows what a lousy job the Administration has done in waging the rhetorical battle: how many voters know or will believe that the stimulus bill “saved up to 4.2 million jobs,” or that middle-class taxes are at “historic lows”? Second, the soaring piano accompaniment is out of tune with the facts as many Americans are living them. Last quarter, the economy grew by a paltry two per cent. For months, unemployment has been stuck above eight per cent, with nearly thirteen million people more or less permanently out of work. The open-ended vagueness of the reëlection campaign’s one-word catchphrase reveals Obama’s problem. Forward from what, and to what?
When Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981, unemployment was at 7.5 per cent, and soon rose to much higher levels. By the time he ran for reëlection, in 1984, the number was back where it had started. Obama’s first term has followed the same path. Reagan argued for a second term on the assumption that the answer to his famous question from 1980—“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”—would be favorable the second time around. He told the country to stay the course, and his “Morning in America” ad ended by asking, “Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”
Obama will have a harder time getting the right answer to that question. Voters knew what staying the course meant in 1984: less government, more capitalism. In 2012, the meaning of Obamanomics isn’t so clear. The President has governed as a left-of-center pragmatist who believed that good policies and their good effects would suffice in winning the debate. This approach put him at the mercy of the economic numbers, which his Administration repeatedly prejudged to be improving. With the numbers now mixed or unclear—manufacturing up, household income down, growth picking up, growth slowing down—and the national mood hardly buoyant, Obama is left to describe to voters the larger vision that has guided all those accomplishments which most of them have never heard of (the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Credit CARD Act). This ideological reticence might explain the campaign’s restless search for a compelling slogan. According to Politico, the list has included “Winning the Future,” “We Can’t Wait,” “An America Built to Last,” and “A Fair Shot.” Surely “Forward,” which sounds like a committee throwing its pencils in the air, won’t be the end of the President’s story in 2012.
The Romney-for-President slogan, “Believe in America,” is so empty that it also served as John Kerry’s, in 2004. (Conan O’Brien recently suggested as an alternative—quoting Romney himself—“I Don’t Have a Core.”) The contest of the slogans suggests that it’s going to be a very long six months, with a deficit of passion on both sides of the red-blue line. Though ninety per cent of Republicans now say that they’ll vote for Romney, he remains distrusted by conservatives, and every move he might make to appease them (such as muzzling a spokesman, Richard Grenell, for being gay) will risk losing moderates. Since Obama is personally popular, and the Republican base is ideologically and demographically a shrinking minority, Romney will have to center his argument on the one issue that could persuade voters across a broad spectrum—the anemic recovery.
A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll has Obama beating Romney in every category from honesty and likability to “Looking out for the middle class” and “Being a good commander-in-chief,” with the exception of “Changing business as usual in Washington” and “Having good ideas for how to improve the economy.” That last category is enough to keep the race close, despite the fact that Romney’s economic ideas are nearly identical to the ones that led to the Great Recession. Last week’s Gallup poll has the two candidates virtually tied, and the economy is unlikely to improve substantially over the next few months. In hyper-partisan America, no one wins Presidential landslides anymore.
Meanwhile, Obama will have to rouse an unenthusiastic base that can’t stop remembering the heroic—though indeterminate—candidate who turned out tens of thousands of people in places like St. Louis and Portland back in 2008, and who couldn’t avoid disappointing many of them as soon as he took office. Elected on the basis of an economic crisis, governing through a period of American inward-gazing, the President is at his strongest on foreign policy. He can claim to have ended one war while winding down a second, and to have eliminated the country’s most notorious enemy while seriously damaging his organization. Obama’s foreign policy of pursuing limited, realistic goals is in keeping with the public mood. For the first time in sixty years, Republicans will be wise to avoid picking fights about national security, as Romney found out last week when his campaign stepped into a hopeless argument over bragging rights to the killing of Osama bin Laden.
But the President’s successes abroad only neutralize a potential weakness; they won’t get him reëlected. By contrast, he will have to speed-talk his way through his most important achievement: the passage of universal health care, a goal that has eluded every President who has tried since Harry Truman. It’s relatively unpopular, badly understood, and might cease to exist after the Supreme Court issues its ruling, next month. In the “Forward” video, health care barely gets more screen time than the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and far less than the obstructionism of the Republican opposition.
In fact, Obama could fairly base his whole campaign on Republican efforts to thwart the economic recovery. But that would sound weak, so his argument will be “Look at what they would do.” Romney will counter, “Hey, things could be better.” Not exactly calls to arms, given that the country’s future is at stake. ♦
