With alarm growing in Democratic circles over Obama’s reëlection strategy—James Carville was the latest big-name to weigh in on the subject—I have jotted down some thoughts on where it should be focussed. But first a word about campaigns in general.

When it comes to analyzing elections, there are two basic camps: the fundamentalists and the Whigs. Fundamentalists believe that objective reality, and in particular economic reality, is the main determinant of who wins and who loses. Whigs don’t discount grand impersonal forces, such as economics and demography, but they put greater emphasis on individuals and campaigning.

As a rule, I am a fundamentalist. Jimmy Carter wasn’t run out of the White House in 1980 because he ran a lousy campaign. He lost because Americans were worried about the economy and the Iranian hostage crisis, and they had lost confidence in his leadership. Similarly, in 2008, Obama’s triumph wasn’t primarily a product of his eloquence, or his messaging. It was a reflection of the fact that Americans had tired of eight years of George Bush and the G.O.P.

TPM’s Josh Marshall is right: political analysts often overrate messaging, and campaigning generally. If a candidate dips in the polls, they say he (or she) is running a lousy campaign. If he (or she) wins, his (or her) campaign managers are hailed as geniuses. Sometimes, there is little basis for these judgements. John McCain did run a poor campaign. But even if he had run a great one, he would probably have lost anyway. Many Americans thought it was time for a change, and that was pretty much that.

Sometimes, though, campaigns do matter. Take 1988 and 2000. In both of those years, the objective circumstances dictated a close race, and superior Republican campaigns won out. George H. W. Bush and Lee Atwater sandbagged Michael Dukakis and Susan Estrich. Twelve years later, George W. Bush and Karl Rove (narrowly) outmaneuvered Al Gore, Carter Eskew, and Donna Brazile. This year looks like another one when the conduct of the campaigns will count. The incumbent has mediocre approval ratings, but so does the challenger. The economy is weak, but it was even weaker when Obama was inaugurated. On his handling of foreign policy, the President is highly regarded, but most voters are focussed on domestic matters.

So what should Obama’s message be? With job growth stalled and almost two thirds of the voters telling pollsters they believe the country is still going in the wrong direction, Obama’s campaign managers understand perfectly well that they have to frame the election as a choice between two possibly unpalatable choices rather than a referendum on Obama’s tenure. Inevitably, that means running a negative campaign and raising more doubts about the G.O.P. challenger. But it also means portraying a positive picture of the President as a dogged fighter for ordinary Americans, who is in the trenches every day battling against an extremist Republican Party.

Paul Begala remarked recently that in almost any election there are really only two campaign messages: “time for a change” and “stay the course.” In making the latter argument, Obama has to be be wary of sounding like he doesn’t get it. The official statistics may say the economy is recovering and things are better than they were when Obama came to office, but, as James Carville, Stan Greenberg, and Erica Seifert point out in a new campaign memo, many independent voters simply don’t believe it. Rather than seeking to persuade them that they are wrong, the President needs to show them two things: 1) He understands their concerns and is on their side; and 2) The outlook for the country will be a lot worse if he loses and the Republicans take over.

Going negative on Romney is pretty easy, and the process has already begun. But portraying him as an out-of-touch rich guy, and banging on about all the people he fired at Bain Capital, won’t by itself turn America against him. In this country, being rich and ruthless isn’t necessarily a barrier to electoral success; to the contrary. Mike Bloomberg is an out-of-touch rich guy and a hard-nosed businessman. A largely Democratic metropolis has reëlected him twice because it views him as a competent, straight-shooter.

The key difference between Romney and Bloomberg is that Romney hasn’t used his money to create an independent platform; he’s thrown in his lot with the G.O.P., which many independent voters view with suspicion. According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, fewer than a third of Americans have a positive view of the Republican Party, and just nine per cent of them have a “very positive” view. That, rather than his own record as a businessman and a governor, is Romney’s achilles heel. In addition to highlighting his record and portraying him as a soulless flip-flopper, the Obama campaign should be relentlessly depicting him as the prisoner of a rabid and obstructionist party that has consistently stymied efforts to get the economy going, and which is committed to an extremist agenda involving attacks on Medicare, Social Security, public schools, and other popular government programs.

Romney’s record in the primaries provides plenty of ammunition for such an assault. Exhibit One, of course, is his endorsement of Paul Ryan’s budget, which includes plans to partially privatize the retirement system. But he also promised to defund Planned Parenthood and PBS, retain the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans, introduce a system of school vouchers, and force millions of illegal aliens to return to their homelands. He said “mine will be a pro-life Presidency” and “we don’t know what is causing climate change.”

Running a negative campaign doesn’t mean that you ignore your own candidate’s record, or his plans for the future; it means that you constantly seek to contrast them with his opponent and what he stands for. On this aspect, I agree with Carville, Greenberg, and Seifert, whose memo was based on focus groups they had carried out with independent voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. These voters don’t trust Romney “because of who he is for and because he’s out of touch with ordinary people,” the memo said, “[H]e is vulnerable on the Ryan budget and its impact on people; he is vulnerable on the choices over taxes.” But the strategists noted that Obama, too, has a problem: “these voters want to know that he understands the struggle of working families and has plans to make things better.”

If this sounds a lot like saying Obama should try to be more like Bill Clinton and show that he feels the voters’ pain, that is hardly surprising: Carville and Greenberg, of course, were key figures in Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Sensing Obama’s weakness on this point, and exploiting his gaffe about the private sector doing “fine,” Romney has in recent days taken to accusing the President of being out of touch with middle-class Americans. Rather than backing down on this one, or trying to change the subject, Obama should constantly challenge Romney on the question of who best understands the concerns of ordinary Americans. Polls show that Obama already has a big lead over the Mittster in this area, which is hardly surprising. Only yesterday, the Romney campaign confirmed that, under its health-care plan, insurers would no longer be legally prohibited from refusing to cover some people with preëxisting conditions.