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Obama has not lived up to his early promise

— PHOTO: AP

Barack Obama during a meeting in Aiken, South Carolina on October 6.

Every week for the past month, America’s all-news cable channels have been telling the same story about Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. The headline along the bottom of the screen says something like “Obama on the ropes”; above, the talking heads agree that his campaign remains stuck in neutral.

Then along comes some new piece of information reminding you that Mr. Obama is still very much in the hunt. A Newsweek survey from late September showed him just leading Hillary Clinton in Iowa — and it is Iowa, not the national polls, that matters. His campaign is building an army of volunteers in Iowa, waiting to spring into action on caucus day. So he could still win Iowa and wake up as the front-runner next January 15.

But he has got some work to do. Mr. Obama’s campaign so far has been disappointing in two ways. First, it provides, especially in contrast with Ms. Clinton’s, a reminder of an often hidden aspect of presidential politics: campaigns are multimillion-dollar corporations, in which the chief executive has to provide the vision and direction and all the moving parts have to work together.

This means, to take an obvious example, that major speeches and policy proposals meant to represent fundamental parts of the candidate’s platform and identity have to be rolled out with great forethought. The candidate and the team need to get the right balance of politics and policy. And they need to be thinking ahead to how the media will react to the speech. They have to write it and present it in a way that increases the likelihood that the next day’s stories emphasise the parts the campaign wanted emphasised.

The Clinton campaign has done this brilliantly, as with for instance her proposal for universal healthcare coverage three weeks ago. The Obama team has struggled. On August 1, Mr. Obama gave a major foreign policy address. Republicans and pundits often carp that Democrats have “no ideas” on foreign policy, but Mr. Obama’s address was shockingly substantive — full of proposals about foreign aid and international strategies to combat terrorism and fight poverty, proposals that really did add up to a vision of America’s relationship to the rest of the world that was both genuinely liberal and appropriately tough-minded.

The Obama campaign keeps making mistakes that a better-run organisation would have ironed out in the eight months that he has been an active candidate. There has been no sign of progress on this front. His speech on tax policy last month was overshadowed by Ms. Clinton’s health plans and received the mixed reviews it deserved.

The second way in which Mr. Obama has been a disappointment is that he just has not been able to present himself as quite as different a political figure as his admirers had hoped he would be.

At the beginning, he seemed like someone who had a deep contact with the ideals that animated America’s founding, ideals of shared civic responsibility that he captured well in his famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. The sentences in that speech were not mere anodyne clichés about unity; they were more profound than that, and they clearly sprang from somewhere deep within him. “There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes.” That is what so many people found inspiring about him.

He has not been able to be that person. Maybe a political campaign is the last context in the world in which someone can be that person. Or maybe this problem is related to the first, and the corporation’s many moving parts somehow got off track and the campaign sort of forgot its raison d’etre.

The experts say he has to attack Ms. Clinton more directly, over her initial backing of the Iraq war and her polarising reputation. Maybe. But I say he needs to do a little of the precise opposite, too. His game plan is not to go nose-to-nose with the Clinton machine. His game plan is to inspire — not to tell us he’s different but to show us through his actions how he is different. Most people who found the Obama who gave that 2004 address so promising still remember what the appeal was in the first place. But people are forgetting. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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