If a US presidential election has the potential to wear down foreign observers, let alone the American public, imagine what it must do to the candidates. The challenger must spend years campaigning for the endorsement of their own party — fighting rebellions and pandering to diehards — while the incumbent has to work equally hard just to keep in play, while also keeping up the presidential day-job.
Perhaps the effects this can have only really sunk in for the President’s supporters as they watched the first debate. His friends have for a while recounted tales of a Commander-in-Chief increasingly disengaged, mooching around the White House as the limitations of the world’s most powerful office sink in. But most of his supporters only became aware of this as they watched their candidate listlessly stumble across what should have been familiar terrain. Who was this man? Surely not the one who had promised to stop the oceans? Or the same person who once promised that ‘we’ were the ones we’ve all been waiting for?
If the 2008 presidential race saw Obama sail into office on the audacious wind of hope and change, his 2012 effort appeared to have floundered on the first sandbank of reality. To some extent, and as reaction to the second presidential debate has shown, this is in part the narrative decided by the US media, including the ‘new’ media. All is hype. But the supporters of Obama once ran on this fuel. The 2008 election was entirely about such intangibles: optimism, hope, charisma. This race, however, is about facts — and the intangibles turn out to be little use when the realities of deficits, borrowing and unemployment have landed.
Even after his second-debate rally, the situation can be judged by the continuing closeness of the race.
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