DEMOCRATS HAD not left Charlotte yesterday morning, Barack Obama’s convention speech still resounding in their ears, when a disappointing batch of employment figures reminded them that the the president’s climb to re-election in November remains a steep one.
The United States economy added only 96,000 new jobs last month, far fewer than the 125,000 predicted by most economists and the unemployment rate remained stubbornly above 8 per cent. No president in recent history has won a second term with unemployment so high, economic growth so low, with personal disposable income stagnant or falling for most Americans and with such a large majority declaring that the country is going in the wrong direction. The fact that the race is so close – almost a dead heat in most polls – is testimony to Mr Obama’s personal popularity and the skill of his campaign as well as to the poor performance so far of his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.
“The times have changed and so have I,” Mr Obama told delegates in Charlotte. “I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the president.” The president has not lost his capacity for soaring rhetoric and he set out the choice between himself and Mr Romney in epic terms, as a battle for the very soul of their country. He was unable to claim that he had solved the problems he inherited from George W Bush, only that his policies were slowly returning the United States to prosperity and that his rival would return to the policies that caused the downturn in the first place. Former president Bill Clinton made the case for the president’s re-election more eloquently than Mr Obama himself in a virtuoso performance on Wednesday that defended the record of the past four years and framed November’s choice as between a “winner-take-all, you’re-on-your-own” society and “a country of shared prosperity and shared responsibility — a we’re-all-in-this-together society”.
The Democratic convention was, despite a few noisy disputes about the party platform, a more buoyant event than its Republican counterpart in Tampa, which failed to deliver any appreciable poll boost to Mr Romney. Democrats point to Mr Obama’s strength in key swing states as evidence that the president has an easier path to the 270 electoral college votes required for victory. The closeness of the popular race ought, however, to temper such confidence. In all but three of the 56 presidential elections – 1876, 1888 and, notoriously, 2000 – the winner of the electoral college was also the winner of the popular vote.
Mr Obama won in 2008 by mobilising a powerful new coalition of African-Americans, Hispanics and young voters, groups that had never before voted in such numbers. Polling suggests that, while African-Americans remained highly motivated in their support for the president, Hispanics and younger voters are much less certain to vote this year than are the older, white voters who form Mr Romney’s base. As the race begins in earnest, Mr Romney has more money to spend and for all his advantages and the confidence of his campaign, the president remains vulnerable.