No one would ever mistake President Obama for Ronald Reagan. | AP Photos The not-so-great communicator

Barack Obama’s light Christmas reading back in 2010 was Lou Cannon’s biography of Ronald Reagan — 920 pages on the political storyteller Obama admired most, to the profound annoyance of his Maddow-loving base.

Obama’s aides can’t quite remember whether the boss ever finished it. Even if he did, no one would ever mistake Obama — an electrifying speaker with the rare capacity, at times, to spin emotion and intellect into rhetorical gold — for the Great Communicator.


Harsh circumstance, relentless conservative opposition and, above all, the inconsistency of his own messaging operation have made it difficult for a supremely articulate communicator to articulate the narrative of his own presidency. That leaves Obama’s high likability rating — hardly his central selling point in 2008 — as his campaign’s main bulwark against Mitt Romney and the super PAC onslaught.

( Also on POLITICO: Full coverage of the DNC)

Obama gets a message-reset moment on Thursday night when he delivers the convention’s culminating speech, a high-stakes address in which he’s expected to lay out a more specific — yet probably not too specific — vision of what he’d do with four more years.

“I don’t think he’s really made the case for getting the credit he deserves. It’s like he hits one thing and moves on. … Win and move on. That’s his pattern,” said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, sitting on the convention floor Wednesday afternoon as his former governor, Charlie Crist, was testing the Teleprompters.

“He’s got to do that this week. He’s really got to tell people what he did and why.”

A half-dozen other delegates scattered on the floor waiting for the action to begin echoed that sentiment.

“Just tell the story already,” advised Brayden Portillo, an LGBT activist from Broomfield County, Colo., who organized college students for Obama in 2008.

( Also on POLITICO: Pundits swoon over Clinton's speech)

Craig Shirley, a veteran conservative operative and Reagan biographer, is impressed by Obama’s talent but stumped by his failure to establish a coherent rationale for reelection — or even a cohesive political identity beyond the change agent of 2008.

“He is a terrific public speaker. It’s not his skills that are the problem. It’s what he has to say that hasn’t resonated,” Shirley said. “Quite frankly, I don’t think he’s well served by his speechwriters. … He has the presence that Reagan had, no doubt about it, but I’m not sure he understands the bully pulpit well enough. I think the 2004 speech [at the Democratic National Convention in Boston] was extraordinary. He had me.

“Since then, I just don’t know what happened.”

What happened was the world fell apart and had to be put back together, Obama’s advisers say. The first six to 10 months of his presidency were a terrifying fire drill, a frantic drive to re-animate a dying economy that left little time for salesmanship or even explanation of the mammoth stimulus that acted as a big, ugly national parachute.

( PHOTOS: Obama over the years)

“Sue us. We were trying to save the country,” a senior Obama aide said over the summer.

That might be true, but somewhere along the way Obama suffered a communication breakdown.

He has lurched from message to message, blurring voters’ vision of the messenger. He’s ensnared in a tangle of middling slogans — “Winning the Future” for the 2011 State of the Union, “Forward” for the 2012 campaign — and has channeled a succession of presidents from Lincoln to Reagan, culminating with Teddy Roosevelt late last year during an attempt to encapsulate his complicated legacy under TR’s banner of “fairness.”

It all started with hope and change in the 2008 campaign. But events compelled a controversial call for a massive Keynesian stimulus a year later, which morphed into the health care push. Then came the midterms and whipsaw shift to deficit reduction. From there, it was on to the nothing-but-jobs focus in 2011 — and Obama’s insistence on eliminating Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy — when his approval rating on the economy tanked.

“He made a strategic mistake when he engaged the Republicans on deficit reduction [in 2010 and 2011] and forgot all about jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told POLITICO. “Last Labor Day, he started talking about jobs again, and he’s stuck with it. … Much better.”

Obama himself acknowledges errors. “The mistake of my first term — couple of years — was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right,” the president told Charlie Rose in July. “And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

That elicited a shot from GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who mocked Obama for being superficial.

“President Obama believes that he hasn’t communicated enough and would use a second term to focus on becoming a better storyteller. America doesn’t need a storyteller-in-chief,” Ryan said during the Republican National Convention in Tampa last week.

Ryan’s attack struck a false note with many in his own party, who think Romney — whose unspectacular convention address barely moved the dial — could learn a thing or two from the Gipper. And there’s no serious debate within the professional political class, and that includes Romney and Obama themselves, that compelling narrative wins national elections.

Obama has been privately frustrated about his team’s messaging for years. That’s a constant in almost every White House, but it’s been particularly pronounced on Obama’s team — simply because it was such a strength in the past.

The president has never been publicly critical of David Axelrod, his rumpled messaging guru. But he frequently expressed frustration with the Axe-run communications shop, especially as he was being flayed on health care reform.

“Why can’t we get our message across?” he would ask repeatedly during planning sessions, according to administration sources quoted in the ebook “Obama’s Last Stand,” a joint collaboration between POLITICO and Random House.

Just after the midterms, Obama quietly tasked Pete Rouse, his low-key Mr. Fix-It, to prepare a plan to overhaul his communications and messaging shop.

David Plouffe, the aide whose thinking and no-frills personality most closely matched Obama’s self image, had long ago agreed to run the White House political and messaging operations leading up to the campaign. Rouse, a master of the velvet purge, would reshuffle the deck. The outside world would be told it was nothing more than a long-planned, minor retooling.

But the problems migrated to Chicago, which had a tough time figuring out just how to attack Romney in the campaign’s early stages.

The basic sequencing of Chicago’s attacks had been planned out for months. They would start by highlighting Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts and his lukewarm record on job creation and deficit reduction. From there, it was on to the main thrust — a takedown of his record at the helm of Bain Capital.

But the messaging initially broke down over how to define Romney during the critical period following the primaries.

During the primaries, Axelrod had hammered home the notion that Romney had “no core,” the attack closest to Obama’s own view that his opponent was a stand-for-nothing opportunist.

As the year wore on, other advisers thought that critique wasn’t “durable” enough, not quite strong enough to sell independent voters on just how bad — and scary — a president Romney would be.

Obama’s pollster Joel Benenson argued internally that the campaign needed to take more advantage of Romney’s pandering to the tea party in the primaries, people close to the campaign said.

That argument already had a powerful external ally no one could afford to ignore — Bill Clinton. The former president made the case forcefully during a Nov. 9 meeting in Clinton’s Harlem office that included Axelrod, Campaign Manager Jim Messina, and Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee Patrick Gaspard. Clinton emphasized that the messaging switch would also bear fund-raising fruit: Big party donors were more likely to open their wallets to fight a conservative bogeyman — à la George W. Bush — than a generic, weaseling politician.

By the spring, Obama’s advisers had abruptly shifted to a “rotten core” from an empty one.

The tweaked message was not a big hit among pundits and consultants, who saw it as a harbinger of a campaign suffering message confusion. “I think it’s kind of curious that they are now starting to portray him as a right-winger as opposed to a weather vane. … You can’t just keep changing these things around; they have to have more of a consistent message, or nobody will buy it,” veteran GOP consultant John Weaver said then.

Obama agreed, according to people close to the situation.

At one of his bimonthly weekend meetings in the Roosevelt Room last spring, an annoyed Obama told those gathered — Plouffe, Axelrod, Messina, deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter and White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, “Can we please tighten this up, guys?”

They did, thanks to a more consistent line of attack against Romney on Bain and Ryan’s Medicare plan, which Romney has more or less embraced.

Romney’s lackluster convention speech creates a major opportunity for Obama to do what he does best on Thursday: deliver a knockout speech that reestablishes his frayed connections with the Democratic base and skeptical independents who voted for him last time.

The problem is that Obama’s big speeches, a surefire game-changer in the past — from his 2004 convention address to his 2008 race speech in Philadelphia to his call for civility in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in January 2011 — have lost some of their punch.

His State of the Union addresses, while not clunkers, haven’t had a huge effect on the debate — and his fairness speech in Osawatomie, Kan., last November was well received — but quickly forgotten.

Some of Obama’s most effective lines this year — the ones that resonate best with working-class voters — have been cribbed from Vice President Joe Biden, whose appearance was pushed from a prime-time keynote on Wednesday to accommodate Bill Clinton.

“Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative,” is an Obama favorite, cribbed from Biden — who credits it to late Boston Mayor Kevin White.

And when Republicans hammered Obama surrogate Martin O’Malley, governor of Maryland, for suggesting Americans aren’t better off now than they were four years ago at the start of the convention, it was Biden Obama aides turned to again.

“We are better off. If [Romney and Ryan] win, people are in trouble. This is not your father’s Republican Party,” Biden told a crowd of 3,500 in Detroit Monday.

“Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”