"We are used to seeing politicians change their position from four years ago, but we are not used to seeing them change their minds in four days." The joke - Barack Obama speaks - is worth a sentence, and concentrates the gist of this autumn campaign for the White House in a few lines. According to Obama, Republican challenger Mitt Romney has so far been bluffing, portraying himself as the sane, centrist leader America needs to rear its head again.
In the TV challenges, Romney has actually shed his skin: in foreign policy he basically agreed with the President on Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. So much so that - ironically - millions of Twitter accounts, during the debate, chirped "Romney's endorsement of Obama". No less significant are the points of cautious convergence on internal management. Health: Romney did not have the courage to abolish the obligation to treat patients despite the notorious "pre-existing conditions" (clauses on which the denial of health care by the
private insurance). As for cups, the governor of Massachusetts has essentially unloaded the extremist wing of the Tea Party, changing his mind on the opportunity to lower the tax on the rich.
In the field financial, the candidate of the Grand Old Party has even given up on demolishing the system of the Dodd-Frank law, pointed to by many quarters (even bipartisan, to tell the truth), as a sort of regulatory moloch unable to bring order to the markets. Not even on school, immigration, abortion, Romney seemed so distant. On the contrary: his agenda on the subject appeared at times indefinite, if not non-existent.
But the centrist turn did not convince. Howard Kurtz writes in the Daily Beast: “this is not the candidate we have been observing for the past two years. If he had run (in the primaries, ed) as the "moderate Mitt", as Bill Clinton calls him, he would have had no chance of winning the Republican nomination ”.
And now the communication managers of "Mitt the Moderate" are taking it out on the media and journalists, accusing them of having misunderstood two years of vitriolic statements. But it doesn't take a political communication manual to realize that the sudden about-face has very specific political reasons: a recovery that is struggling to give signs of rebound is the best "asset" for those who try to grab the vote of the undecided.
And here, Romney stole the "scepter of balance" from Obama. Up until last summer, the tenant of the White House was quite certain that he was the "best choice" of the Americans, a guarantee of solidity and the ability to mediate between opposite wings of Congress: just think of the August 2011 agreement on debt limit (an agreement all in all suffered by the President), to the low-profile strategy in Libya, to the choice of opting for a model of health care still based on private structures (while Hillary Clinton, during the primaries of 2008, proposed a system closer to the universalist European model, where the state pays all the health costs).
But in the US politics also lives day by day, and the moderation of the White House, which has aroused many protests in the liberal wing of the Democrats, is no longer a resource that can be spent in the electoral campaign. It is no coincidence that Romney appears to be on the rise, and in an average of polls calculated by Real Clear Politics today he is in the lead with 48% of the preferences, compared to the President's 47,1%..
Some of Obama's communications officials are already running for cover, suggesting that he remember that - after all - a lot has been done in Washington. A way of saying that Obama has so far been too submissive, arriving "unloaded" at the most important moment. After all, “Obama's economy has done well under the circumstances,” headlines today an editorial by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, demonstrating that the credibility of the White House would suffer a backlash if the chameleonic Romney wins. Above all in foreign policy and in the ability to interface with the other giant in crisis, that Europe absent from the debates which however also plays a fundamental role in the US recovery.
In reality, the two challengers' program is very undefined: Obama responded to the 12 million "jobs" plan heralded by Romney with a manufacturing relaunch plan of the same magnitude, as well as ideas for reducing the increase in costs university students.
But the rigidity of the public budget, based on strict rules that risk plunging the stars and stripes economy into the darkness of the "fiscal cliff", will hardly allow playing with "deficit spending" to boost consumption and employment. Whatever the color of the next Congress.
