Now Mitt Romney Is Scary

The Obama campaign is worried — and the GOP can hope.

Obama should win. But he could lose. This is how a Washingtonian political insider describes the air being breathed in the rooms of the bigwigs and the strategists of the Democratic Party. Why this sense of bewilderment and concern surrounding a talented character like the sitting president who is facing an objectively very modest challenger? “The Obama campaign,” explains our source, “is mediocre, self-congratulatory and not strategic, and what’s more they’re self-referential, that is not at all open to the contributions and the advice of others. It’s a billion-dollar operation, but it’s run by a small circle. Ultimately, it’s based on nostalgia, for recapturing the wave of 2008, which has long since dissipated. There is no way to help them because they reject any kind of help. It’s scary to watch all this.”

A merciless diagnosis that you could also dismiss like the old, never-appeased rancor of the Clinton clan — our source is from that circle — against Barack Obama. Many indications, however, say that that’s exactly the way things are. The latest is that in the Democratic primary in Kentucky on Tuesday, the president won with 58 percent of the votes. A strong victory? Not really, considering that the Democratic primary elections are little more than symbolic and that in many states the presidential candidate has no opponent. And where he does, they’re folk characters and improbable challengers. So, in a southern state, which Kentucky indeed is, a good four out of 10 voters went to the polls to vote for delegates not bound to him [Obama], but “uncommitted,” that is without a binding mandate to be carried out at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte at the beginning of September. Actually in 67 out of 120 counties, the votes for uncommitted delegates exceeded the votes for Obama delegates.

It was almost worse in Arkansas, where the president was subjected to the shame of the 40 percent his opponent achieved, one John Wolfe, a lawyer in Tennessee whom the press defines as a “perennial political candidate,” a kind of parsley for all the elections, who participates in order to achieve a moment of notoriety.

Sure, Kentucky and Arkansas are solidly red states, that is, they’re securely Republican, yet these wacko primaries are still indicative of a troublesome Democratic weakness in the southern belt of the country. So, what a couple of weeks ago seemed like a local oddity — 40 percent obtained by an inmate, Keith Judd, in the West Virginia primaries — was a symptom of a more serious malaise which Obama’s team seems to be underestimating.

Sure, the president and his advisers can also take heart with the latest polls. Such as the one from the Wall Street Journal that gives Obama the advantage over Mitt Romney: 47 percent to 43. But then, they better scrutinize the figures between different particular segments, and they discover that the numbers are less rosy. 48 percent of respondents, against 46, disapprove of the president’s performance and only 33 percent believe that the country is headed in the right direction, while just over 50 percent disapprove of his handling of the economy.

Another survey, conducted on behalf of MSNBC, paints a very positive picture for Obama amongst electoral sectors traditionally loyal to him — such as African-Americans, Hispanics, women, youth, seniors, independents — and paints a negative picture in other sectors which are predictably hostile — whites, males, residents of the Midwest, the wealthy, suburbanites — but above all, the survey confirms the general lack of confidence in his management of the economy (43 percent, down two points in a month!).

You can argue all you want about the value of these surveys at a little more than six months away from the presidential elections, an eternity in political terms. You can also assert that if Obama isn’t doing well, Romney’s not doing any better than him. But what’s worrying the Democratic establishment is just that. His Republican rival, for his lack of political stature, and in these still-early stages of the presidential race, should be far behind the sitting president, both in the polls and in fund-raising. But instead, the two are neck and neck on both fronts.

So much so that yesterday Politico published a lengthy analysis by Jonathan Martin, which Obama strategists must have read avidly and with apprehension. “Top Republicans, long privately skeptical about their presidential prospects, are coming around to a surprising new view — that Mitt Romney may well win the White House this November.” Talking with several leaders of the GOP, Martin gives the impression of “a newfound optimism that with a competent, on-message campaign, Romney will be at least competitive with a weakened incumbent.”

This optimism is also fueled by the observation of the problems in the Obama house, first of all the evident difficulty — noted also by several Democrats — to find, on Obama’s part, “a concise message against Romney.” All this creates a virtuous circle around the Republican candidate, who sees a united party behind him and a base, at first reluctant, now supporting him with conviction. A virtuous circle that for the Democrats begins to resemble a vortex of anxiety and fear.