Obama: change you can believe in?

It was billed as the speech that would reset Barack Obama‘s election campaign, after a week when key Democratic insiders have been questioning whether his message on the economy is out of touch with the pain which voters are feeling.

In the event, the president’s address to supporters in Ohio was based around tried and tested themes: describing the election as a stark ideological choice, and accusing Mitt Romney of wanting to return America to the policies of the past.

“This election presents a choice between two fundamentally different visions of how to create strong, sustained growth, how to pay down our long-term debt and, most of all, how to generate good, middle-class jobs so people can have confidence that if they work hard, they can get ahead,” he said.

‘Talk is cheap’

The lengthy speech didn’t go down well with pundits, like Bloomberg’s Jonathan Alter, who told MSNBC: “I thought this honestly was one of the least successful speeches I’ve seen Barack Obama give.” And Democratic congressman Mark Critz, who’s facing a stiff election challenge from the Republicans, chimed in, claiming Obama should realise the country couldn’t spend its way to prosperity.

We can’t afford to jeopardise our future by repeating the mistakes of the past Barack Obama

Also in Ohio, a mere 250 miles away in Cincinnati, Romney was firing up his supporters: telling them that Obama was driving America forward over a cliff. “He’s been president for three and a half years, and talk is cheap. Actions speak very loud.”

Obama’s campaign has not had the best of weeks. Last week’s jobs report was the kind of gloomy economic news he could well do without. An off-the-cuff remark, that the private sector was ‘doing fine’ was instantly seized upon by his opponents as evidence that he is out of touch: Team Romney has already turned it into a political TV ad.

This, in a week when the President will be holding a huge fundraiser in New York with Vogue Editor Anna Wintour, at Sarah Jessica Parker’s house.

And then, to cap the growing internal mutterings about Obama’s own strategy, a memo by top consultants James Carville and Stanley Greenberg which stated pretty bluntly that the message about the economy getting better simply wasn’t washing. Voters, they said, “know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle — and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand.”

‘Keeper of the flame’

So what’s the problem, here? Could it be that the very campaign team which performed such miracles in 2008, are perhaps not the best people to be running an incumbent’s campaign: could they simply have lived too close to power to be able to discern how people are feeling out there in the real world?

For an insight, you could do worse than hear from the most senior insider of all, David Axelrod – chief campaign strategist for 2012, formerly senior adviser to President Obama in the White House.

In front of an overwhelmingly friendly crowd at New York’s 92nd Street Y this week, Axelrod was unwilling to admit any problems with the message, instead driving home the same themes: Romney would drag America back to the past, whereas Obama can offer the best hope of a broader, lasting recovery.

In fact, New York Magazine’s John Heileman described Axelrod as “keeper of the flame, keeper of the narrative”, and he clearly delighted in proffering a series of narrative portraits, from his first introduction to politics, aged 5, taken to see a speech by JFK, to his highly personal reaction, as a father of a daughter with epilepsy, to the passing of Obama’s controversial health care bill.

But despite the stellar success of four years ago, when that compelling narrative of a black American with a vision of hope and change and a new kind of politics proved an unbeatable formula, the message of 2012 is proving far more elusive.

Cynical

For the Republicans, it’s simple: blame Obama for the mess we’re in. And if that’s the frame of reference voters are using, can the Democrats win that kind of election?

Axelrod described his rivals as deploying a “cynical calculus”: criticising Romney for suggesting there was no need to recruit more teachers, and defending tax cuts for the wealthy. Romney, he said, was a man with “a foreign policy from the nineties, a social policy from the fifties, and an economic policy from the twenties”.

It’s a clever catchphrase, but will communities still facing swingeing job cuts and homes they can’t afford to buy or sell, be listening?

Axelrod insisted no-one wanted to go back to the days of huge cuts in social programmes and mass unemployment: “We tried that. We know how that story ends”.

But how will the Obama story end? Tellingly, early on in his talk, Axelrod spoke about his years in the White House as a time of astonishing experience, where “everything was consequential”, where so much of great magnitude happened every day they’d think: “What is this, a West Wing episode?”

Yet, like that award winning television show, the centre of power in Washington is notoriously a place completely sealed off from the rest of the world: Axelrod called it a “cauldron of conventional wisdom” where you can only peek out through a periscope.

Is that any place, then, from which to try returning to the campaign trail, a job which demands the most finely tuned awareness of what ordinary voters are thinking and feeling? Can they recreate the magic of 2008 from such a place?

One Democratic insider told the Washington Post this week he thought not: “The bad thing is, there is no new thinking in that circle”.

‘No drama Obama’

In essence, Obama wants this election to be all about the middle class: financially outgunned by the Romney team, his grassroots organisers have been working for months to build that machine-like ground campaign which proved so crucial four years ago, in 13 of the most crucial battleground states.

In 2012, team Obama are banking on the hope that the middle classes will have faith in the president’s ability to steer the economy to a better place: if you’re not better off now than you were four years ago, then you might be a bit better off soon, but I’ll be slow, and incremental.

Not an easy message to sell at the best of times: the campaign slogan, “Forward” seems frustratingly simplistic. For Axelrod, the more disciplined message which the Republicans are putting out, is quite simply wrong.

“They all say it, but but that doesn’t make it so”.

And don’t forget the president isn’t known as ‘No drama Obama’ for nothing. He’s not the kind of man to change tactics mid-stream, or shake up his campaign team.

“We can’t afford to jeopardise our future by repeating the mistakes of the past,” he told the crowd in Ohio on Thursday: but perhaps that’s as true for his own campaign strategy as it is for the American economy.

Change you can believe in, indeed.

Felicity Spector writes about US affairs for Channel 4 News