Once upon a time, a candidate ran for president on the issue of competence. “This election isn’t about ideology,” he told the 1988 Democratic National Convention. “It’s about competence.”

The candidate’s name was Michael Dukakis, and the competence issue was a flop. Ronald Reagan was president, and his competence actually was in doubt. The Iran-Contra scandal revealed that the president didn’t know what was going on in the White House basement.

But the economy was booming, and Dukakis’ opponent was Vice President George H.W. Bush. Bush had held almost every top job in Washington, including Reagan’s vice president and director of the CIA. No one was questioning Bush’s competence.

It’s now more than 25 years later, and the theme of this year’s midterm campaigns is — guess what? — competence. Washington Post reporter Chris Cilizza wrote in July, “You can understand President Obama’s current political problems — and how those problems could make things very tough for his party in this fall’s midterm elections — in a single word. And that word is ‘competence.’”

A year ago in November, the Obama administration pressed ahead with a stunningly bungled rollout of Obamacare. Then there were sorry revelations about mismanagement in the Veteran’s Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the General Services Administration. The administration’s responses to Islamic State atrocities in the Middle East and to Russian aggression in Ukraine have looked ineffective. The American public decided U.S. border security failed over the summer as tens of thousands of young Latino migrants flooded into the United States. Meanwhile, the once admired Secret Service is mired in scandal and challenged by repeated breaches of White House security.

Even though Reagan wasn’t exactly a hands-on manager, he had something going for him that President Barack Obama doesn’t. Reagan was able to reassure Americans that the situation was under control. The public needs to believe that a president is in control of events — even though he often isn’t. Reagan did it with a display of immense self-confidence and a steadfast certainty about his own ideas.

Obama does not reassure people. Maybe because he’s too smart to rely on homilies. After all, Obama’s thoughtful and deliberative qualities were among the factors that got him elected. They were in sharp contrast with President George W. Bush’s recklessness. Yet those same thoughtful and deliberative qualities are now undermining this president’s authority.

What did Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar say? “Let me have men about me who are fat/Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights./Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look./He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

Reagan was not fat. But you can be pretty sure that he did sleep a-nights. And no one ever accused him of thinking too much.

Republicans are using the Ebola outbreak to make the case that the Obama administration is unable or unwilling to protect the American public. Just in the past week, scary ads mentioning Ebola ran 734 times, almost all sponsored by Republican candidates and conservative SuperPACs in hotly contested U.S. Senate races (Georgia, Arkansas, Iowa, Colorado).

Obama hasn’t been able to lower the temperature. “We don’t want to do things,” he said on Tuesday, “that aren’t based on science and best practices because if we do, we’re just putting another barrier on somebody’s who’s already doing important work on our behalf.”

Of course it’s wonderful that American healthcare workers are trying to save Ebola victims in West Africa. But what is the government doing to protect us — and them? Obama might be surprised to know that Americans do not have as high a level of confidence in “science” as he does. After all, one in three Americans does not accept the theory of evolution.

And aren’t scientists the guys who keep telling us that something we used to think was bad for us is actually good for us? Public trust in the once highly respected Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dropped from 60 percent in 2013 to 37 percent now, according to a CBS News poll.

Now we hear that the military is imposing a quarantine on returning U.S. military personnel who have been working to stem the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. At the same time, Obama rejects quarantines for medical workers returning to the United States. The government is not speaking with one clear voice.

People realize they can’t have absolute security — whether it’s from terrorist attacks or viruses. They just want to be reassured that the government is doing everything it can to protect them, and that the situation is under control. The appointment of an “Ebola czar” has not really done that.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a potential 2016 Republican presidential contender, said this week at a university forum that Obama’s response to Ebola “looked very incompetent to begin with, and that fueled fears that may not be justified.”

Obama is a complex thinker. He may be too cautious and deliberative to communicate total reassurance. Intellectually, that’s commendable.

Politically, it can be ruinous.

PHOTO (TOP): President Barack Obama pauses while speaking during a meeting with members of his team coordinating the government’s Ebola response in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, October 22, 2014. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

PHOTO (INSERT 1):Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, 1988 Democratic presidential nominee. WIKIPEDIA/Commons



PHOTO (INSERT 2): President Ronald Reagan addressing a news conference in Washington, October 19, 1983. REUTERS/Mal

Langsdon