Awkwardly inadequate

Neither Obama nor Romney deploys the skills of persuasion and compromise that identify someone suited for politics

It’s not hard to figure out why the 2012 presidential election is such a downer. The economy looks bleak and global instability is more dangerous than usual, but there’s something else: Neither party is running a real politician for president. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney deploys the skills of persuasion and compromise that identify someone suited for politics.

Both are talented in various ways but they know little about braiding disparate sections of society, an essential element in political leadership. We find ourselves watching two uncomfortable men trying to be what they are not. The last time the parties produced such awkwardly inadequate champions was 1976, the year of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s troubles in his first term stem from his distant, inaccessible personality. He won great crowds with his eloquence in 2008, but in office showed no interest in people who don’t share his world view. In Jodi Kantor’s valuable book, The Obamas, he sounds like the antithesis of a candidate, a man who has trouble making friends and isn’t sure he likes being president.

He has lately shown an intolerance for the rich, becoming the first American leader in memory who has revealed this prejudice. Perhaps understandably, this has alienated people like Penny Pritzker, his earliest big-money backer, the Hyatt hotels billionaire who ran the committee that raised $745million for his 2008 campaign. She’s doing the minimum for him this time.

Almost the only thing that marks Romney as a politician is his ambition. He came first in the primaries because he proved minimally acceptable to the various Republican cabals. By nature, he’s an oldfashioned moderate Republican (once he would have been called a Rockefeller Republican) who turned himself into an imitation right-winger. Many Republicans grudgingly accept him because they have no one better.

Obama and Romney are fighting over the theme of the campaign. Obama wants voters to stop obsessing over his failure to deal with the economy and worry instead about Romney’s career as a rapacious capitalist. Romney wants the opposite. The hucksters working for Obama have moved boldly onto Romney’s home court, the economy, and done their best to prove that he can’t resolve the fiscal crisis. He doesn’t understand how to create an economy, they argue, he just knows how to exploit one. Offshore is a key word in their TV ads: Offshore is where he sends other people’s jobs and his own money.

Obama, who campaigned on hope in 2008, now campaigns on his opponent’s income tax reports. Romney has made public two years of returns, the same number John McCain revealed in 2008. The Obama forces want more returns and suggest Romney is hiding something. Romney thinks that handing over more records would just give the Democrats hundreds of pages of data “to pick through, distort and lie about.”

On this trivial issue, Obama has won at least a short-term victory. On Thursday, a Gallup Poll certified the tax returns as an election issue by reporting that 54% of Americans say Romney should hand them over (37% say he shouldn’t). And in the last few days various Republicans have told Romney to stop resisting. The Republican governors of Alabama and Mississippi, Rep. Ron Paul, George F. Will, the National Review and William Kristol all say the same. My guess is Romney’s advisers agree. But Romney will stand firm, until he changes his mind, possibly today.

For the moment, at least, the Obama forces have Romney and his handlers on the defensive. A moderately shrewd politician would have avoided this trap or escaped from it within 24 hours after it was sprung. And this is only one way Romney betrays his amateurish approach. His worst fault in this campaign is his failure to set forth the program that will lead the United States out of the recession.

In his two terms, he says, he’ll balance the budget, but he doesn’t say how. He seems to think people will believe him, without much evidence beyond his personal fortune. The voters need more than that.

But explaining himself is a skill he’s never mastered and perhaps hasn’t thought much about. Maybe he considers it unnecessary. He doesn’t know that many of his fellow citizens automatically view people of great wealth with suspicion. Has he never noticed that in the TV cop shows the rich guy is always the killer? Americans may love the idea of making money, but it doesn’t follow that they love those who actually do it.