Selling Reality

In the battle for a second term, Obama has apparently lost some of his hope-and-change luster. But a return to reality is not necessarily a bad thing.

“Hope is a soufflé that never rises twice,” the well-known political observer William Galston once said. The Brookings Institute think tank expert and former Bill Clinton advisor came up with this metaphor while looking for ways to describe Obama’s campaign for a second term in office. The president’s biggest enemy seems to be the fall of hope.

Standing at the DNC podium in Charlotte, North Carolina last week, the current U.S. president couldn’t avoid being compared to the inspiring African-American senator from Chicago who promised to transform America four years ago. At times, it looked like his true opponent in this year’s election was not the Republican candidate Mitt Romney, but the 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama. No doubt, this weakness will be used by Romney’s campaign, while the president’s team will look for ways to reassure the American people that Obama’s second term in office will be better than the first one.

Obama vs. Obama

Obama’s battle with the 2008 version of himself has become explicitly evident in the organization of the Democratic convention in Charlotte. Instead of trying to twist the discouraging statistics, Obama’s campaign team took a humble and clearly realistic path. Their strategy was to take out of the picture everything that could be perceived as “too much.” Exaggerated gestures such as the grandiose Greek columns that decorated the Denver stage four years ago were blacked out of the script. Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign clearly sought a careful balance between acknowledging that the president and his team have learned their lesson, and reassuring voters that bitter experience has not devalued their passion for change.

Even without the constant reminders coming from the Republican camp, voters know that Obama has delivered on very few of his 2008 promises. The unemployment rate is 8.3 percent; the budget deficit reached $1.2 trillion. Economic growth, which supposedly gained initial momentum, slowed down to two percent in the second half of the year. Commitments — such as closing the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, opening a channel for dialogue with Iran, advancing the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and laying the foundations for new relationships with Russia and the Muslim world — remain unfulfilled. The U.S. pulled out of Iraq, but the strategy in Afghanistan has led to an escalation of conflict.

The Obama administration suffers a certain degree of naiveté. To some extent, he is right about putting the blame on the right wing of the Republican Party for blocking Congressional decisions. On the other hand, the way the White House handles bipartisanship is far from perfect. Washington Post political correspondent Dan Balz noted, “His advisers cannot point to a clear strategy for trying to create a climate of cooperation — other than their belief that the support he won in the election and the economic crisis would create those conditions. … And there is not much evidence that, as things turned sour, there was a fallback strategy for how to change the climate.” Today, Washington is ideologically more divided than ever. After the fiasco with America’s credit rating downgrade last summer, Congress is practically entirely idle.

The big achievement of the current administration — healthcare reform — remains a multivolume stack of documents whose effects on everyday life are still unclear to most Americans. The auto industry sector was saved from bankruptcy, but fails to create new jobs. The financial reform, with its numerous pages, is regularly attacked for being too bureaucratic and for having a limited impact on the most acute problems.

Other victories of the current administration, such as the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the elimination of Osama bin Laden, are not enough to stifle the anxiety of ordinary Americans, an anxiety triggered by weak economic figures. Obama’s usual defensive reaction — that things would be even worse if it wasn’t for his measures — is the least inspiring message that could be sent to the electorate, especially when compared to the big hopes for change raised in 2008.

Despite the disappointment, the electoral math is on Obama’s side. The reason the president is leading the race with a slight but meaningful advantage is the plethora of problems in the Republican camp. “The president doesn’t need to win over new votes,” explains Peter Brown, assistant director of Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. (His institution is considered one of the most accurate and independent source of poll numbers in the U.S.) “All he needs to do is to make sure he has the votes he had last time.”*

The demographics are on the Democrats’ side because Latino and African-American minorities, women, young people and the well-educated prefer the Democrats over the Republicans. The gaffes and extremist remarks of the conservatives (such as the “legitimate rape” comment, Obama’s “fraudulent” birth certificate charade and the attempt to suppress the vote of minorities and youngsters through a revision of election procedures) leave the impression that the right has turned into the party of unhappy, aging white men.

While the selection of Paul Ryan, who looks like a younger version of the governor, as candidate for vice president was a smart move, it has also reinforced this negative view of an increasingly closed-off party. And this comes at a time when America is becoming more and more multiethnic and multicultural. Thus, even a record drop in Obama’s popularity among financially weak and poorly educated white Americans could be easily offset by the growing number of ethnic groups (traditionally Democratic voters).

Sociologist Peter Brown explains the strategic importance of the distribution of power at this stage of the campaign with an example from basketball. When time is limited (as in the two months before the elections), the leading team is automatically favored. “If the numbers in the ratings remain the same as they are now, after the Democratic convention, it will be a small victory for Obama. The team with the lower score is the one that has to catch up as quickly and as effectively as possible.”

Despite the obvious advantages it has so far, there are plenty of opportunities for Obama’s campaign to lose momentum. This is especially true given the fact that Team Romney is much more sophisticated than the team of Republican candidate John McCain four years ago. Romney’s crew foresaw the disadvantage of the electoral math and quickly changed tactics at the GOP convention in Florida. The first new hope for conservatives, Marco Rubio, launched the attack, noting that Obama is a good husband and father, but that “[o]ur problem is not that he’s a bad person. Our problem is that he’s a bad president.”

Later, Romney added: “I wish President Obama had succeeded, because I want America to succeed.” Nobody could seriously believe in the sincerity of the speeches, but they managed to capture the lingering feeling of disappointment after the high hopes in 2008. The new attack is making Obama’s campaign team sweat because, as the political website Politico noted, they know very well that the comparison between what Obama promised and the current state of the country is the president’s greatest weakness.

The American media are also speculating on how and whether an international crisis could stir up the campaign trail. In Washington it is crystal clear that if Israel decides to attack Iran in the two months before November, the White House would have to choose between acting (and angering the Democratic left), or avoiding intervention and taking the risk of looking weak (and thus alienating independent voters). In both cases, Obama would be in a highly unfavorable position.

Even without such a cataclysmic event, foreign observers such as Brown say that the coming months could bring other surprises. For example, it is quite possible that the frustration which has piled up over years of administrations failing to pass necessary deep reforms could overturn the conventional political theory. “When Romney chose Ryan for his running mate, the media forecast was that this would cost him Florida because of its vast population of pensioners. (Author’s note: Ryan proposes significant cuts to Medicare, the government healthcare program for people over 65 years of age.) The polls, though, show the exact opposite — the right has strengthened its position there. Sometimes, reality is different than our hypotheses,” adds Brown.

Voters are apparently tired of meaningless rhetoric, and that very fact may turn out to be good news for the not-so-inspiring Obama in 2012. To win the elections, this time he needs to be the opposite of the candidate who won four years ago, who promised lots of magic and very few details. The information leak revealing what would be the main priorities of his second term tells us that this fact has been realized by the White House. Among the priorities are: tackling global climate change, developing a new energy policy, reforming taxes and immigration, limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and developing a more efficient way of distributing aid to developing countries to further guarantee stability and peace in the world.

Obama will have to offer convincing solutions to two big issues of his first term — strengthening economic growth and shrinking the record budget deficit. Unlike four years ago, he will have to explain to the electorate, in detail, the concrete steps he intends to take to make that happen. Predictions that Republicans will regain at least one of the chambers in Congress will surely breathe new life into worn out bipartisan rhetoric. If the two parties do not find a way to reach out to each other across the ideological trenches, Obama’s second-term ambitions will be just a bunch of unfulfilled promises.

It’s true that this year’s presidential campaign does not bring magical feelings of optimism and historic change. But more realism and a focus on working out the details are not bad news. Quite the opposite: The flat soufflé of hope promises to be an important lesson for both the candidates and the voters.