Playing hardball: The challenges facing Barack Obama

THE emails tell their own story. In 2008, supporters of Barack Obama were galvanised by daily inbox updates from the Democrat candidate, full of soaring hope and rhetorical references to “change”. Today, the emails still come thick and fast from Obama, beeping on iPhones and buzzing on Blackberries across the United States, but the message has changed.

A note of urgency, just this side of desperation, has crept in. “I’m counting on you to help us keep pace in spite of unprecedented spending on the other side,” the president wrote in a campaign email on Friday. The inspirational, mould-breaking candidate, praised for running the first joined-up election campaign of the internet age, is now a grizzled president frantically fighting to hold on to his job.

With 65 days to go until America goes to the polls, and with seven in ten voters saying the country is on the wrong track, Obama faces a dilemma which is existential as much as political. How should a candidate whose mantra has always been “change”, campaign for re-election? If he argues that his changes need another term to bed in, is he implicitly campaigning against the failures of his own first term? Has the president who promised an end to politics as usual become a politician like all the rest?

That uncertainty may explain why a key ingredient is missing from the Obama campaign so far. Since his opponent Mitt Romney threw Republicans some red meat by announcing Paul Ryan as a running mate, the Republican base has been buzzing with energy and enthusiasm. But four years after his triumphant election, Obama-mania has all but gone, evaporated along with millions of American jobs and foreclosed homes.

The promised “hope and change” have largely failed to materialise. The economy has stalled, the unemployment rate is stubbornly stuck at 8.3 per cent and the US federal budget deficit is on track to top $1 trillion for the fourth year in a row. With time running out, Obama must – yet again – pull off the performance of a lifetime and convince America that he has what it takes to deliver on his early promises.

“Obama needs to energise the base. A lot of liberals are disappointed with Obama. Republicans are much more excited about this election than the Democrats,” says John Geer, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.

Obama’s big opportunity to inject some much-needed excitement into his campaign comes this week as delegates and the world’s media descend on North Carolina for the Democratic National Convention. In an attempt to shine more celebrity wattage on their man than the Republicans could muster for their convention, the Democrats will wheel out their big battalion of showbiz stalwarts, from Eva Longoria to James Taylor. And the biggest Democrat star of all will be in town to put in a bravura performance. After a difficult relationship with Bill Clinton, love, or at least a kind of rapprochement, seems to have broken out between the two presidents.

The wildly popular Clinton, 42nd president of the United States, has been given top billing at the convention in an effort to excite the Democratic base and bolster Obama’s claim that he can return Americans to the levels of prosperity they enjoyed in the 1990s. Clinton will present Obama as the heir to his popular legacy while portraying Romney as someone who would take the country back to the dark days of George W Bush.

Obama’s first term in office has not been without successes. He has delivered on many of his promises. His bailout of the car industry is credited with bringing entire regions of America back from the brink. And though far from universally successful, his stimulus programmes do finally seem to be producing results. He has overseen the winding down of the war in Afghanistan, the end of the war in Iraq and the killing of Osama bin Laden. But boasting of foreign policy successes won’t help win over undecided voters in a year when all everyone cares about is jobs.

While incumbents with a strong track record can let their achievements speak for themselves, Obama’s mixed results mean he will have to work a lot harder to persuade voters to give him more time to get the job done. Ken Khachigian, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, worked on Reagan’s 1984 re-election convention speech. He says: “I had a good story to tell in terms of the successes Reagan had achieved in bringing the economy back.” In the absence of this, Khachigian believes Obama has no option but to go for the jugular: “Obama’s number one goal will be to portray Romney as a rich, uncaring individual who doesn’t understand America.” As is traditionally the case with conventions, it will fall to vice-president Joe Biden to do the character assassination, allowing the president to concentrate on soaring rhetoric.

The context is that Romney and Obama are virtually neck and neck. Despite spending millions of dollars on television adverts and resorting to increasingly negative campaigning, neither the incumbent nor the challenger has been able to pull ahead. The latest National RealClearPolitics poll shows Obama leading with 47 per cent to Romney’s 44 per cent, while a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week showed Romney at 47 per cent among registered voters and Obama at 46 per cent. And with Romney spending three times more than Obama in some swing states, those ratings could shift significantly.

What of Obama himself? The President’s character has long fascinated political observers. Whereas Bill Clinton was emotional, expressive, and wore his political heart on his sleeve, Obama has always been considered, cerebral and unemotional, a politician who keeps his cards close to his chest and doesn’t believe in unnecessary emoting. But there is a ruthlessness too: the professorial president authorises routine drone-strikes against America’s enemies and has kept Guantanamo Bay open after campaigning to close it.

Ironically for a candidate who made America believe that he would rise above the politics of the gutter, Obama’s ability to win the election could hinge on his willingness to play hardball. “It’s going to be a very negative campaign. Obama doesn’t have a lot to run on so he has to get dirty,” says Geer, the author of In Defense Of Negativity: Attack Ads In Presidential Campaigns. This view is echoed by Elaine Kamarck, a former adviser to Bill Clinton: “He’s got to plant doubts in voters’ minds about Mitt Romney and who he is and that he might just be as bad as Bush.”

The biggest strength of Obama’s campaign is the perceived weaknesses of his opponent. Though Republican convention organisers worked hard to humanise their candidate, their attempts to make Romney seem like a regular guy have only succeeded – in the words of Bill Whalen, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution – in making the Republican candidate come over “like your boss at a picnic”. On the issue of likability, polls show Obama with a massive 34 percentage point lead over Romney – 61 per cent to 27 per cent. “People like Obama whether they agree with his policies or not. Voting for your president is a visceral thing – do I like this person, do they care about me and can they help me with my problems? That’s hugely to Obama’s advantage,” says veteran Democratic strategist Garry South.

Obama might be liked, but is he effective? A consensus has emerged among Democrats that Obama’s biggest mistake as president is that he has spread himself too thinly. “Obama made a fundamental mistake in his first term of trying to do too much too fast and he’s paid a heavy price for it,” says South. There is also general agreement that Obama over-promised on his ability to fix the economy. Obama has repeatedly described the downturn as the “worst since the Great Depression.” But it took America more than a decade to recover from the Great Depression, and Obama told voters he could provide a quick fix.

The Democratic convention may fire up Obama, galvanise his supporters and reignite some of the excitement of 2008. But if the President has a good rather than a transformative convention, the next decisive point in this nailbitingly close election will be the first presidential debate on 3 October. Whether it will be a game changer will depend on the ability of the candidates to deliver a knockout blow. Obama will be hoping that Romney doesn’t remind voters of the rhetorical question Reagan asked during his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”, which helped him clinch the presidency. If he does, Obama, like millions of Americans over the past three-and-a-half years, might find himself looking for somewhere new to live. «

• Claire Prentice covered the 2008 US presidential election for Scotland on Sunday and from next month will be filing on-the-ground reports from this year’s campaign trail. Look out for Claire Prentice’s America, from mid-October