If Obama does not lose, he needs to find his humility and his humanity

IT will be interesting, after tomorrow’s US Presidential debate, to watch the credit-takers lining up behind the winner.

The credit-takers are those who, after any election, write or cause to have written, books, blogs and theses crediting their contribution or singular insight as pivotal to their candidate winning the election.

Four years ago, the credit-takers were techies. Never mind Obama’s pretty obvious unique selling propositions. Never mind that the American voter was looking over a George W Bush created abyss and not liking what they couldn’t see at the bottom of it. Never mind that the brave old man on the other side was demonstrably and across a number of fronts clearly not at the races, even before he lumbered himself with a bespectacled fruit bat as running mate. Nope. What mattered was the electronic messaging, according to the credit-takers, last time around.

Of course, the unprecedented millions who walked through the pre-dawn chill of Washington to get to the Mall for President Obama’s inauguration gave the lie to that claim.

You cannot take America by the heartstrings electronically. You can do it through a personality, a rhetoric, a confluence of thoughts and the time within which they’re expressed. Once you have those established, people will project onto your candidate the characteristics they want him or her to have, the persona they want them to be. Texts and tweets, emails and blogs are reinforcers. No more. No less.

What the president discovered, this time out, is that the process works both ways. If you fail to turn yourself into an inevitable force of destiny, through personality and rhetoric, if your thoughts and the time within which they’re expressed no longer mesh, then people stop projecting their dreams on to you and the aura that glowed around you like the body-halo of light around the kids in those old TV advertisements for porridge disappears.

The groundswell that swept you in, first time around, breaks up. It breaks into the intellectually committed, the viscerally committed — and the bitterly disappointed.

Never was any man better supported by the intellectually committed than Obama, going into this election. At one end of the continuum of intellectual support sat Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, whose constant churning out of pro-Obama columns and blogs argued a willingness to endure extreme sleep deprivation in the interests of his man. At the other end was Bill Clinton, who ably and energetically promulgated the perception of Obama as an achiever, a rescuer, a president doing wonders when dealt a lousy hand.

The viscerally committed were those on whose psyche Obama was irrevocably tattooed — genetic Democrats for whom the contest was a no-brainer and who became incoherent with rage, faced with lucid Republicans arguing for Mitt Romney. (Several Irish commentators, over the last few months have earned themselves honorary inclusion in this group.) Viscerally committed Democrats are just as closed-minded as the viscerally committed Republicans they oppose. But then, there ain’t no bigot as bigoted as a liberal bigot.

The most significant group were the disappointed Democrats. The scope and depth of their disappointment is profound. These were people stamped with a set of beliefs, who saw the election of Obama as the vindication of those beliefs and, therefore, as a personal validation.

For them to move apart from their man was tremendously difficult. It required that they first think and then say aloud that most difficult statement: “Maybe I was wrong.” It required that they acknowledge the possibility that they over-estimated a man who never had the capacities with which they wishfully endowed him.

But even if the groundswell has broken up and changed over the last four years, the fact is that with that level of intellectual and visceral support, together with a cohort that yearned to be re-confirmed, to believe again, President Obama should have been out front from the word go, especially up against a contender carrying so many disadvantages. It was the man himself who, just a few days ago, inadvertently pointed to the reason he was not out in front.

“After four years as President, you know me,” he told people in Ohio.

True. But as the Telegraph’s Charles Moore points out, voters, as a result of those four years in office, have a different take on the president’s character than they once had. Seeing him now as “a media- savvy professor of an Ivy League university — comfortable with irony, more than comfortable with the sound of his own voice, confident that he knows a great deal more than most of us”.

That persona was what sank the president in the first debate, which is widely believed to have been useful to Romney, but which, in fact, gave the incumbent an unmerciful kick in the complacencies and forced him to prepare and engage in a completely different way, second time around.

Then came Hurricane Sandy, which had two outcomes. The first was to gag Romney for several days, causing his campaign to lose momentum at a crucial point, out of which he emerged in ridiculous photographs loading WalMart water bottles into a truck. The second was to allow the president to “look presidential”. Now let’s think about that one for a minute. We have to have a hurricane for him to look presidential?

“Looking presidential” in this instance consists of Mr Obama looking brisk and purposeful and occasionally hugging people. This presidential look depends above all on him being at the disaster area. Which he wasn’t when the BP oil spill happened. But in this instance, he was in the right place, doing the right things, embracing the right people, saying the right things.

If the combination of marginally better debates and doing what he’s supposed to do in disasters pushes Barack Obama over the final hurdle back into the White House, then he will have failed to lose the presidential election. If he is a man of insight, he will remember that people matter as much as policies do. He will develop the Lyndon Johnson capacity to negotiate and seduce opponents, issue by issue, rather than moaning about the impossibility of changing Washington from the inside. He will grow, change and develop into the great president his supporters so badly want him to be. He will learn to be right, rather than righteous.

The problem is that when the righteous are preserved from extinction, they rarely see it as a second chance, an opportunity for redemption. That’s for sinners and failures. The righteous believe they were preserved because of what they have been and as a result, perceive no need to change their behaviour.

If — assuming he wins — Obama adopts that stance, he will be remembered in history as a bloodless intellectual technocrat who outsourced his humanity to his wife.