In public, the Obama and Romney campaigns will express only confidence. Lies the parties are telling themselves

For the presidential campaigns, the long, slow, anxious summer is starting to drag.

With Election Day still more than three months away and a few weeks still to go before the conventions, there’s relatively little that operatives on either side think they can do to shift the dynamics of the race.


So with the fundamentals of the 2012 campaign increasingly locked in place – a weak, economically hobbled incumbent matched off against an unsteady, unpopular challenger – strategists on both sides have turned their attention to another rite of summer during presidential years: convincing themselves that they’re winning.

National polling shows the race is as close as ever. The vulnerabilities of both candidates have only grown over time. In public, both the Obama and Romney campaigns will express only the purest of confidence that their candidate is ahead.

( Also on POLITICO: Romney's private equity mindset)

So in private, strategists and supporters of both candidates have been kicking around a collection of arguments for why they really, truly, honest-to-goodness have the upper hand in the race.

Here’s our guide to some of the wishful thoughts (some of them more wishful than others) making their way around the 2012 universe in the pre-Labor Day doldrums.

First, the Democrats …

Bain is a silver bullet for the Obama campaign

The Bain Capital attack worked for Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. It even worked for Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. At the end of the day, some in the president’s party believe, the majority of Americans just won’t vote for a man tied to layoffs, outsourcing and corporate bankruptcies.

So far, the polling data is not so conclusive. In a June NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, a third of swing-state voters said Romney’s business experience made them view him more negatively, versus 18 percent who said it made them view him more positively. Yet a Gallup/USA Today poll published last week found that by a 34-point margin, voters said Romney’s business background would lead him to make good decisions as president.

There are few outside Mitt Romney’s circle of advisers who believe the Bain attacks are just bouncing off. Even Democrats are now making a more nuanced case about Romney’s business career: not that the Bain brand will sink him on its own, but that it will erode Romney’s credibility on the economy and soften him up for attacks on Social Security, Medicare and more.

“While criticism of Romney’s business record may not resonate with elites, it is clearly resonating with the actual voters who will decide this election,” Priorities USA Action strategist Bill Burton wrote in a June memo. “For voters across the country, profiting from failure and breaking promises to employees illustrates that Romney would not stand up for the middle class as president.”

The 2008 electorate will return for Obama

There may be an enthusiasm gap now, Democrats tell themselves, but we’ll be able to count on the Obama coalition when it counts in November. They’ll see the stakes, the race will be close and they will come.

Four years ago, Obama narrowly won states like North Carolina and Indiana thanks to a huge surge in support and enthusiasm among young voters, African Americans and other groups with whom he had unique electoral appeal. The composition of the electorate changed dramatically in the 2010 midterms and Democrats got wiped out as a result.

Democrats are betting that when the final moment of choosing comes, their base will show up – with some help from the Obama campaign’s extensive, costly field apparatus. But there are indications of a deeper and, for Obama supporters, more alarming malaise among the core groups that made Obama president.

“Democrats are significantly less likely now (39 percent) than they were in the summers of 2004 and 2008 to say they are ‘more enthusiastic about voting than usual’ in the coming presidential election. Republicans are more enthusiastic now than in 2008, and the same as in 2004,” Gallup pollster Jeffrey M. Jones wrote last week. “If Democrats do not close the enthusiasm gap between now and Election Day, it would put Obama’s re-election chances in serious jeopardy.”

The donors will engage any minute now

For almost a year now, Democrats have said that their fundraising base would return - freaked out by the prospect of a Romney presidency. But so far there’s little to suggest a wholesale panic attack.

It’s not like the Democrats are doing poorly in fundraising. But they are getting outraised by Romney’s campaign.

The Democratic donor fatigue is amply documented - Wall Street donors, centrists, business-minded ambidextrous givers who were staples of the Bill Clinton era generally feel poorly treated by the current White House. Obama’s lack of interest in so-called “donor maintenance” is also well known - he has little appetite for the schmoozing that his Democratic predecessor did. And the repeated, and heated, rhetoric about Wall Street and the financial services sector has caused real and likely sustained damage for Democrats.

Those are the donors who would be the likeliest to give to a super PAC, but the White House discouraged such giving for months, frowning on the Citizens United decision that paved the way for such profligate single-source donations. Yet the bigger problem is that massive numbers of low-dollar donors have also not returned to the fold yet.

Professional fundraisers say, across the board, that they can’t remember a tougher fundraising climate in recent times.

It’s entirely possible that, as the fall gets closer, Democratic donors will have a threat-of-death moment, but they’re not there yet.

Voters forgive Obama for being dealt a bad hand

For months, the president’s team has said that people remember just how bad things were when he took office, and cut him a bit of slack because of it.

“When the economic crisis hit in 2008 people recognized that this wasn’t an ordinary recession,” Obama’s pollster Joel Benenson told a group of reporters at a Bloomberg News breakfast in July. “And everybody who keeps talking about it using the word recession is doing a disservice to what the country went through. And the American people actually understand that a lot better than the people who were commenting on that oftentimes.”

Democrats hope that’s true. But there is not much evidence in public polling that people are giving the president benefit of the doubt over the economy.

The president’s handling of the economy, in survey after survey, has not been a positive for him. Romney has had the edge on the ability to handle the economy in several state-based surveys. The bright light for Obama in these surveys is he tends to be favored on whether voters think the candidates care about people like them.

It’s the main reason the Obama campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars in TV ads, many of which have been critical of Romney’s business experience.

The details of the financial collapse during the 2008, despite the magnitude of the event, have faded from the public consciousness, amid chronic unemployment numbers. It’s a challenge for Chicago to remind them, and a potentially risky assumption that they already know.

On the Republican side …

Outside spending will save us

Both Democrats and Republicans frequently point to the staggering amounts of money that GOP-leaning groups like American Crossroads will raise as determinative for the fall. Democrats use it as a fundraising tool for themselves, and an excuse down the road to spin a possible loss.

But Republican donors and others are adamant in private conversations that the hundreds of millions of dollars that outside groups on the right will raise is going to save Romney.

That may end up being true, and Democrats do fear that the spending is going to swamp them. But strategists on both sides acknowledge that the glut of spending has gone to TV ads, the sheer volume of which is unprecedented, and which voters are starting to tune out.

Both sides are aware that they need to come up with creative ads to break through the clutter. And in September and October, when the presidential race is at its peak and the televised debates take place, it will be virtually impossible for the outside groups - which follow the messaging lead of the candidates - to get oxygen.

Free media doesn’t matter as much in most races anymore, but it does in presidential contests.

Romney doesn’t need to be liked

Mitt Romney is poised to head into the Republican National Convention in Tampa as the first presidential nominee in decades with upside-down favorability numbers. And if you ask his closest allies, they’ll argue it doesn’t matter.

Their case goes something like this: whatever Americans may think of Romney on a personal level, they’d rather vote for a gaffe-prone, unapproachable robot who can fix the economy than a charismatic and glamorous incumbent who’s totally inept when it comes to creating jobs.

If that’s how Americans view their choice in November, Romney’s advisers may well be right.

The trouble is, between now and Election Day, Romney’s weak public image means he has precious little room for error. Voters will be more likely to interpret Romney’s missteps in a negative light. As Obama delivers a harsh, character-based attack on Romney’s candidacy, the Republican is not in a strong position to cry foul or win public sympathy.

The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page lamented in a harsh missive this month that Romney was either turning a blind eye to personality-based attacks – or actually enabling them.

“The Obama campaign is assailing Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch rich man, and the rich man obliged by vacationing this week at his lake-side home with a jet-ski cameo,” the paper fumed.

No issues matter except the economy

Romney is a candidate who is predisposed to caution, and keeping all but his closest of intimates at bay. And he’s comprised a team of like-minded operatives and strategists who think the biggest error he could make is talking about himself. Or about foreign policy. Or about anything other than the economy.

Ask any Romney adviser and you will be told a version of this sentiment: “The only thing that matters is the economy.”

Romney’s speeches have been almost entirely about the economy for the last year. He has made two foreign policy addresses, including one last week at the VFW Convention in Reno - which did not elaborate on the details of a Romney Doctrine. Instead, it focused heavily on the national security leaks coming out of the White House. He gave a speech on education policy, one which mostly distanced the candidate from the signature planks of his GOP predecessor, George W. Bush. And Romney also fleshed out his views on Iran in a speech in Israel Sunday during his current foreign tour.

There is no question that the economy is the most important issue in the 2012 cycle, bar none. And it is the issue on which Obama’s numbers remain weak. But even Romney supporters say privately they think he is taking an unnecessary gamble in a winnable election by refusing to say more about himself, or what he will do in office.

The risk for Romney is that he says nothing, the attacks on his business career take hold gradually and corrosively. Voters expect their presidents to be multidimensional, and so far, Romney hasn’t demonstrated an ability to be that way.

It’s really very simple: a president can’t win reelection in circumstances this bad

It’s one of the most reliable clichés of the 2012 campaign: no president since Franklin Roosevelt has been reelected with unemployment over 7.2 percent. As Obama campaigns with the jobless rate over 8 percent, Republicans have pointed to that figure as proof that the Democrat is all but disqualified.

There’s no question that the economy is the biggest anchor on Obama’s campaign. But the historical data is also a bit facile. There have been three presidents since Roosevelt who campaigned for reelection with an economy this weak: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush.

They all lost, but they also all faced substantial problems on top of the economy: Ford was campaigning in the shadow of Watergate (and very nearly won.) Carter had the Iranian hostage crisis. Bush faced a destabilizing third-party challenge from Ross Perot.

What’s more, presidents have won reelection under challenging circumstances. Harry Truman is the most famous one, barely capturing a second term in a bad economy by campaigning against an intransigent Congress. But Richard Nixon also coasted to reelection despite the grim state of the war in Vietnam and George W. Bush overcame concerns about Iraq to defeat his opponent.

The economy may be the primary factor in this election, but it’s not the only factor and it may or may not result in a simple up-or-down judgment on Obama. Every reelection campaign takes place under a different set of conditions and there’s no simple arithmetic for determining whether a president’s external challenges will be fatal.