Obama’s Squandered Advantages

By FRANK BRUNI in The New York Times

AFTER “a couple of Cadillacs,” a summer belly-flop abroad, a dismissive swipe at 47 percent of the population and a convention best remembered for Clint Eastwood’s chat with a chair, Mitt Romney is seemingly tied with President Obama. He has a real chance. It’s a remarkable turn of events, given how many errors he’s made and how ill suited he is to this particular juncture in the American story. And to size up the situation honestly is to consider one conclusion as seriously as any other:

Obama isn’t quite the candidate, or politician, he’s cracked up to be. The One is a fraction of his reputed self.

Yes, I know: the economy. It’s supposedly the source of most of his woes, the great weight he lugs around, a nearly fatal handicap. And the fact that he’s doing as well as he is affirms the sway of his personality and sense of his policies, at least according to his most fervent admirers.

I don’t buy it. For starters, a great many Americans understand that he doesn’t bear primary responsibility for the high rate of unemployment and the drops in home prices and incomes. A CNN/ORC poll last month showed that 54 percent of likely voters placed the blame chiefly on George W. Bush and Republicans.

Additionally, 68 percent indicated some optimism about economic conditions, which they said would be “somewhat good” or “very good” in a year. There’s room in those numbers for Obama to pull well ahead of a rival as profoundly flawed as Romney. Yet he hasn’t.

Race isn’t a sufficient explanation. It has flared in subtle and unsubtle ways during this campaign, but if a majority of Americans were too biased to vote for a black man, Obama wouldn’t have beaten John McCain by nearly 200 electoral votes last time around. In fact Obama’s 52.9 percent of the popular vote was a bigger number than all but three other Democrats in American history have reached.

And “super PACs” aren’t doing Obama in. Things could change in this final stretch, but until now, he hasn’t been buried under the avalanche of Republican ads that, six months ago, Democrats were terrified about. Obama and his supporters have in fact run more commercials, which seem to have reached a larger audience in some key battlegrounds, than Romney & Co. have.

Obama has enjoyed other advantages as well. He didn’t go through a contested primary, and as Matt Bai recently observed in The Times’s Sunday magazine, all three of the incumbent presidents who lost their re-election bids over the last 36 years were weakened by primary challengers. Romney, meanwhile, endured an ugly primary that tugged him to the right of most swing voters and teed him up for the shape-shifting he has attempted — and been justly dinged for — over the last month.

Romney is further tarnished by association with a Republican Party that seems to be accommodating more and clumsier extremists, whose statements — like the one that Richard Mourdock, a Senate candidate from Indiana, made about abortion and rape — cause him recurring grief. That’s not to mention the party’s grandstanding windbags, two of whom — Donald Trump and John Sununu, a co-chairman of Romney’s campaign — were in full and demented flower over the last few days.

The country’s changing demographics favor Obama, as he acknowledged to The Des Moines Register last week, saying that the Latino vote could seal his victory. Incumbency has its benefits, too. Earlier this year, he sidestepped a bickering, paralyzed Congress and pleased many Latino voters with an executive order that will probably spare hundreds of thousands of young immigrants deportation for at least two years.

But Obama’s greatest gift has been Romney himself, whose wealth, his tin-eared allusions to it, his offshore accounts and his unreleased tax returns are an especially awkward fit for a moment of increased anxiety about income inequality.

A “Saturday Night Live” skit from before the debates summarized this archly.

“Our campaign has a secret weapon,” says Obama.

The camera cuts to Romney at a rally. “I understand the hardships facing ordinary Americans,” he says. “One of my horses failed to medal at the Olympics.”

Back to Obama, who croons “Let’s Stay Together.”

And then to Romney, who warbles “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” declaring the song “pretty groovy.”

Obama smiles: “The man is a Christmas miracle.”

THE miracle ended at the first debate, in Denver, and the problem with that face-off went beyond Obama’s sleepwalking to the kinds of subsequent debates it forced on him. To shake off what happened, he had to turn truculent, and while that technically “won” him his second and third meetings with Romney, he lost something in the bargain. He undercut his high-minded, big-vision brand, whole stanzas of doggerel intruding on the poetry.

His “bayonets” line was clever all right, and plenty fair in its way, but it had a schoolyard nastiness to it, the same nastiness in one of his campaign’s most prominent ads, which showcases Romney’s off-key rendition of “America the Beautiful.” I wonder how that line, that ad and the overall atmospherics register with voters in the middle, some of whom are no doubt asking themselves where “hope and change” went and hid.

The main cause for this contest’s closeness is arguably Obama — and the ways in which he has disappointed, confused and alienated some of the voters who warmed and even thrilled to him four years ago. During his first term, he at times misjudged and mishandled his Republican opposition. As a communicator, he repeatedly failed to sell his policies clearly and forcefully enough.

His tone is markedly changed from 2008, a tactical decision that may not be the right one. And his moments of genuine oratorical transcendence are interspersed, as they’ve always been, with spells of detachment, defensiveness, disgruntlement. Denver wasn’t the first or only time that he seemed put out by the madness of the political merry-go-round, even though it’s a whirl he himself elected.

I still think he’ll win this thing, and I think he’ll win it because he’s a seriously intelligent, thoughtful leader more in tune and in touch with Americans’ lives than his sheltered opponent is. He still has poetry in him, and he still has fight. But this campaign has illuminated nothing so brightly as the limits of his magic, along with shortcomings that he would carry with him into a second term (should he get one) and would be wise to address.