VietNamNet would like to introduce a series of article about the presidential election in the US, by G. Calvin Mackenzie, the Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of Government at Colby College in the USA and currently a Fulbright scholar in Vietnam.

The seemingly endless American presidential campaign entered its penultimate phase last week, the last hundred days. Perhaps, then, this is a good time to offer some observations about what has occurred so far.  Here are a few of those.

For all of the speeches made and money spent, little has changed since Mitt Romney emerged as the Republican candidate last spring. It appeared to be a close race then and it appears to be a close race now. The efforts of President Obama and Romney have done little to move potential voters.

Neither candidate has stimulated much enthusiasm, even among his own core partisans. Romney sparks little emotion among Republicans, his nomination more the result of the weakness of his opponents than his own strengths or the depth of his support. The passions that Obama stirred in 2008 have dissipated over 4 years of his presidency in a very challenging time. Obama the rock star has been replaced by Obama the cautious Washington politician.

Few Americans had a clear image of Mitt Romney when the campaign began early in 2011, and his identity is not much more clearly formed now than it was then.  This is reflected in the current strategy of President Obama which is to portray Romney as wealthy, out-of-touch with common people, and eager to cut taxes on the wealthy at the cost of burdening the middle class. Candidates often try to portray their opponents in negative terms; Obama has been especially effective at that because Romney has had such difficulty presenting himself more positively––despite spending more than a hundred million dollars to do so.

Romney has defied one of the oldest traditions in American politics: in the general election candidates move to the center. Romney realized early on that he could secure the nomination of the Republican Party only by staking out positions far to the right on the contemporary American political spectrum. In our time, the Republican Party is dominated by its most conservative elements. And winning the nomination of that party requires a devotion to conservative orthodoxy. Romney offered that devotion, even when it required him to take positions opposite those he had held in the past.

Had he followed the pattern of most previous presidential nominees, he would have begun to modify some of those positions as he moved into the general election. Presidential campaigns are usually fought out in the center of the ideological spectrum where most voters reside. But Romney has not followed that pattern. He continues to stand where he stood in the battle for the Republican nomination.

The speculation among some observers is that this is part of a broader Republican strategy to redefine the contours of the political spectrum, to push everything to the right by treating what had previously been perceived as middle-of-the-road ideas as the left wing of American politics. That would permit the Republican agenda––lower taxes, less government regulation, large reductions in government spending––to appear more moderate.

It is a risky strategy, one that failed miserably when the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater attempted it in 1964. But the American people are generally more conservative now than they were then, and the corrosive impacts of 5 years of economic struggle may have paved the way for a significant change in governing philosophies. That is the bet that some Republicans are willing to make, and it appears to be a shaping force in the Romney campaign.

To date, this has been a campaign largely devoid of substance. This might have been an opportunity for President Obama to lay out an agenda for his second term, to offer Americans a vision of what 4 more years of Obama leadership might yield. He has not done that, however, nor has he even done much to define the accomplishments of his first term or present a coherent overview of his presidency. Ask an American today to describe the Obama presidency in a few words and you are likely to get little more than a confused look. One of the important tasks of an incumbent is to convince the voters that they made a good choice in the last election. Obama has been surprisingly unsuccessful at that.

Romney, as the challenger, has a wonderful opportunity to present a different agenda than the incumbent’s, to offer a specific critique of current policies and a clear expression of the alternatives he would pursue. The Romney campaign has offered plenty of criticism of Obama but very little in the way of substantive description of how his administration would govern differently.

So we seem to be having an election that is different in important ways from what has often been typical in the past. And it will be instructive to watch the final few months to see where all this leads.

G. Calvin Mackenzie