The affirmative agenda of 2008 has disappeared. The world has turned out to be vastly more intransigent than Obama thought, or perhaps hoped. He learned, as I wrote two weeks ago, that citizens in the Middle East were waiting for a change in American policy, not a change in American leadership. Afghanistan has proved to be a vast pit of quicksand swallowing up time and attention, not to mention U.S. lives and dollars. And on climate change, nonproliferation, foreign aid, and the trial of terrorist subjects in civilian courts, congressional Republicans threw every obstacle in his path they could lay their hands on.
If the president has changed his hopeful worldview, so has his audience. It's a truism that voters don't care about foreign policy, but they also don't feel good about America's capacity to make the world a better place. According to the latest Pew Research Center poll, the proportion of Americans who believe that the Arab Spring will turn out well either for Arab peoples or for the United States has plummeted since the heady days of early 2011. Almost two-thirds of respondents say that they want the United States to be less involved than it has been in "Middle East leadership changes" -- an unambiguous negative on intervention in Syria. Growing numbers want to see tougher action on Iran and China, while a solid majority favors removing troops from Afghanistan "as soon as possible."
Is it any wonder that when Obama talks about his successes today, you hear almost nothing about the 2008 agenda or even about the New START arms-reduction treaty?
"I killed Osama bin Laden" and "I'm getting out of Afghanistan" speak both to his own diminished expectations and to a very dark public mood. That loss of public hopefulness is itself the most powerful sign of the failure of the promise that Obama once incarnated.
Is this his fault? Maybe yes, in the sense that he raised expectations he could not satisfy. But mostly it's not, because Obama has been dealt as lousy a hand abroad as he has been at home. He inherited two wars, the Iranian nuclear standoff, and an increasingly assertive China, and he had to contend with an epochal convulsion in the Arab world over which Washington has very little control. Voters are fearful and angry in part because America's capacity to determine what happens in the world is so plainly dwindling.
And Romney is quite content to exploit that fear and anger. He and his proxies have focused relentlessly on the trivial question of whether Obama ascribed the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, to terrorism -- though recent news reports have vindicated the White House's initial judgment that the attack was provoked by a video insulting the Prophet Mohammed rather than being the result of a long-gestating plan. On the far more important question of whether the United States should have intervened in Libya -- and whether the White House should use force for humanitarian purposes in the absence of overriding national security goals -- Romney has accused the president of acting both too slowly and too precipitately, and once actually ran away from reporters rather than provide a direct answer.
Romney has also tried to score points on Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria, but he is hobbled by the fact that his expressed views are almost identical to those of the president. Instead he fires blanks, loudly insisting that Obama is wrong, weak, irresolute, even where the two fundamentally agree. It's disingenuous, but apparently effective: The Pew poll found that Obama leads Romney on foreign policy by only 4 points.
Until recently, it seemed obvious that this final debate would give a lift to Obama's candidacy, if a modest one. That's no longer obvious at all. Although Obama acquitted himself well in the town-hall debate, it was striking how much of the debate was conducted on Romney's side of the policy argument, whether the subject was energy or guns or even tax relief. Given the narrowing poll numbers, that may be even starker on Monday. It will be "I made you safer" versus "No, you didn't."
Yet I have to believe that Obama's best chance lies instead in widening the lens, talking about how he has adapted American policy to a changing world, used international institutions to magnify U.S. power, and assisted at the very difficult birth pangs of democracy in the Middle East. He can strike a hopeful note without sounding naive.
Maybe I'm giving voters too much credit. Still, the World Series doesn't start until Wednesday, so I guess I'll be watching.
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