WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Some politicians seem to be covered in Teflon — criticism slides off them like food off the non-stick coating on pots and pans.

Ronald Reagan was famously the Teflon president, shrugging off attacks with a twinkle and a smile, and Bill Clinton remained popular with a wide electorate despite obvious flaws and a visceral opposition from some quarters.

Barack Obama is not exactly in that category but he appears to have more Teflon than Mitt Romney. After all, he’s still in the race even with an exceptionally high 8.3% unemployment rate.

Paul Ryan's roadmap to prominence

Criticism seems to stick to Romney, however, forcing his campaign to change tack in response to attacks on his record at Bain Capital or demands for his tax returns.

The latest Washington Post-ABC poll shows Obama way ahead of his Republican rival in likability. The incumbent was deemed to be the more likable of the two by 64% of those polled (61% if you just count registered voters), compared to 25% for Romney (27% of registered voters).

Does this matter? Well, it might, and the Romney campaign wants to use this week’s Republican convention to humanize a candidate who seems remote to the man and woman on the street. A team of advertising experts is reportedly working on ways to recast a man who often appears robotic and awkward.

Remember “lipstick on a pig”? Obama’s casual reference in the 2008 campaign to how cosmetics couldn’t disguise bad Republican policies led to angry charges, fervently denied, that he was making a sexist reference to the party’s vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin.

But voters nationwide have had a chance to watch Mitt Romney through two presidential election cycles, and the needle on likability has scarcely budged from polls earlier this year. A cosmetic touch-up during the convention probably won’t change things.

The Post-ABC poll sheds some light on another tactic in the convention — a shift away from a focus on the economy.

Mitt Romney is showing off his warmer side in an effort to connect with voters. Reuters

While Obama gets a negative rating on his handling of the economy and a majority of people don’t think the country is on the right track, voters don’t seem convinced that Romney could do a better job of fixing the economy.

When asked how confident they would be that the economy would get back on track in the next year or two if Romney was elected, 55% said they had little or no confidence that would happen, while 43% were more or less confident it would. Those are almost exactly the same numbers as Obama polled — 56% not confidence and 43% confident.

So it doesn’t matter at this point whether George W. Bush or Alan Greenspan or Barack Obama is more responsible for the parlous state of the economy — or whether the candidate is a fabulously wealthy private-equity investor or a former community organizer — if the two men running for president are seen as essentially the same in their ability to cope with it going forward.

Voters, it seems, are not buying Romney’s argument that successfully running a business makes you an expert at job creation. Or perhaps they are wary of trickle-down economics after it has failed to produce any positive results for them after three decades. Or maybe they realize that you can’t be serious about cutting the deficit if you’re not willing to raise taxes.

In any case, the Romney campaign has pivoted away from the economy to focus on winning white voters with attacks on Obama’s putative “gutting” of welfare reform by removing the work requirement — a charge that most charitably could be called misleading — as a not-so-subtle dog-whistle appeal to, uh, ethnic differences.

Faced with Obama’s huge lead among Latinos, African-Americans, and women, the Romney campaign has little choice but to rally white males who can relate to a “Catholic deer hunter” like the presumptive vice presidential nominee, Paul Ryan.

Can the attacks on welfare, or the equally misleading attacks on Medicare plans, survive a face-to-face debate between the two presidential candidates?

It’s not likely that a scripted convention will suddenly make Mitt Romney likable or give him a Teflon coating for his Bain record or his tax returns.

His best chance to win over those voters who are not firmly in one camp or another will be the televised debates this fall. Romney may try to brazen out his misleading charges about welfare and Medicare, but he’s not likely to score many points when Obama is right there to cite chapter and verse refuting these claims.

And here’s where the likability factor comes in — think Reagan versus Jimmy Carter, or Clinton versus the senior George Bush.

A word of advice for Romney: Don’t look at your watch halfway through the debate, wishing it was over.

That was a mistake made in 1992 by the senior Bush, a former businessman on his way to losing to the more likable Clinton, who was just a smart guy with no private-sector experience, even in a year with its own economic issues.