Many television interviews with politicians are hardly worth watching. The pol trots out his (or her) prepared talking points. The questioner tries to elicit a gaffe or an incendiary statement, which will generate some headlines. The viewer, bored, starts wondering whether the next commercial will be for a Statin, an anti-depressant, or a new Toyota Camry.

Sunday night’s interviews with President Obama and Mitt Romney on “60 Minutes” were more interesting than the norm. Perhaps because they ran in succession, or perhaps because they amounted to a preview of next week’s first Presidential debate, they provided an illuminating portrait of the two candidates, and why one is leading the other. Obama performed his usual shtick as the last reasonable man in Washington, a dogged defender of the ordinary American. Romney, despite acknowledging his own slip-ups and making some substantive points on entitlement reform, came across as a heartless rich guy.

There weren’t any big headline-makers. The closest thing to a zinger came when Obama accused Romney of war-mongering over Iran, saying, “If Governor Romney is suggesting that we should start another war, he should say so.” The closest thing to a gaffe came when the President referred to the death of four American officials in Libya, including the Ambassador, as “a bump in the road”—a statement some right-wing commentators have seized upon. Obama may also have upset some hardline supporters of Israel by describing it as “one of our closest allies in the region,” but that’s inside baseball.

Romney’s interview with Scott Pelley, which was shown first, was the meatier of the two. Inevitably, given the problems his campaign has encountered, the G.O.P. candidate was forced onto the defensive, as Pelley probed him about his personal finances, his plans for Medicare, and his campaign errors. But liberal viewers hoping to see a man beaten down by his predicament will have been disappointed. An upbeat Romney insisted, “I’m going to win this thing.” He answered most of Pelley’s questions directly, displayed a command of policy details, and attempted to dispel one or two myths about his intentions, saying, “I will not raise taxes on middle-income folks. I will not lower the share of taxes paid by high-income individuals.”

On Medicare and Social Security, he went considerably further than Obama has in explaining how he would safeguard the programs’ finances, and reaffirmed his explicit commitment to means-testing: “So what I do in my Medicare plan for younger people coming along is say this: We’re going to have higher benefits for low-income people and lower benefits for high-income people. We’re going to make it more means-tested. I think if we do that, we’ll make sure to preserve Medicare into the indefinite future.”

Listening to Romney talking like this, it was almost possible to believe he is a moderate and well-meaning fellow—the sort of candidate old-school Republicans were hoping to see when they rallied behind him. But other parts of Romney’s interview gave the opposite impression. Even when he is being careful about what he says, he sometimes comes across as uncaring and harsh. The problem isn’t just that he makes mistakes. It is that, in refashioning himself as a candidate acceptable to the Republican right, he has committed himself to a number of things that are deeply unattractive.

One is the notion of very rich people, with lots of savings, facing lower tax rates than regular, working people. Here’s the exchange on tax rates:

PELLEY: Now, you made on your investments, personally, about twenty million dollars last year. And you paid fourteen per cent in federal taxes. That’s the capital-gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes fifty thousand dollars and paid a higher rate than you did? ROMNEY: It is a low rate. And one of the reasons why the capital-gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as thirty-five per cent. PELLEY: So you think it is fair? ROMNEY: Yeah, I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth, to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work. PELLEY: And corporate tax rates? ROMNEY: Corporate tax rates, also, I’d bring down and with the same idea.

Is it any wonder that Romney scores so poorly relative to Obama on the question of understanding the concerns of ordinary Americans?

A second deeply unattractive proposal is the idea of cutting health-care services for the poor. (All but confirming Bill Clinton’s warnings in Tampa, Romney boasted that sending Medicaid back to the states would save the federal government a hundred billion dollars a year.) A third is the idea that it’s O.K. for tens of millions of working Americans not to have any health-care coverage at all. This is a man, remember, who made the principle of universal health care law in Massachusetts. Now, though, he is determined to run as fast as he can from his own success: