If champagne were still allowed on Planet Labour, the corks would be popping to celebrate the arrival of David Axelrod on the election campaign team. One of the main strategists behind Barack Obama's victories, Axelrod is an impressive hire for Ed Miliband.

In the pullulating salon of Washington string-pullers vying to claim credit for masterminding presidential victories, the Ax-man has more right to claim credit than most. A leading figure in Obama's 2008 and 2012 election wins, his strategic acuity, teamed with the talents of the great vote-motivator David Plouffe, saw their man home. Usefully for Miliband, Axelrod has an impressive record with ingenue candidates, having first helped hone Obama as a distinctive post-Clinton era politician, when he ran for the Senate in 2004.

Message control is the essence of the electoral potion. If it sounds like pasteurised politics of the type that makes us guffaw when watching Veep, it nonetheless brings home the bacon. Axelrod's law – "The candidate is the message" – pursued the twin theme of positive change and a new populist push, designed for the interactivity of the smartphone era. Peddling the catchy "Yes we can" optimism, even when Obama was languishing in the polls and many thought he couldn't, also took some nerve and a clear instinct.

Axelrod loathes convoluted micro-policy discussions. Labour's mind-bogglingly dull policy review Agenda 2015, which even Mr Miliband cannot bring himself to sound enthusiastic about, is a prime example. Let me refer the newcomer to the last three sessions on the review website on respectively, migrant exploitation, a victims' taskforce and exploitation (again) in the care sector. Worthy as these may be, they play to the view of Labour as the party of the underdog and hand-wringing activist rather than one uniting around key messages, embodied in the figure of the leader.

As chair of Labour's election efforts, Douglas Alexander has ruffled many feathers by warning that Labour's pitch for power is in danger of becoming blurred. One insider on the end of this advice calls these homilies "Wee Dougie's long lectures of doom". But Mr Alexander's instincts about the weaknesses of campaigns tend to be sound. He has been the main mover in attracting Mr Axelrod, not least because he is aware that his boss comes across as well-meaning, but a bit woolly.

The present situation is a tempting one for an incoming strategy guru. Ed Miliband leads the Tories by around six points: encouraging enough to have escaped the "he'll never win it " category, but falling short of the over 40% approval rating that would lure us to bet the mortgage on a runaway Mili-win. Many on his own side still seem to find the thought of an overall majority hard to credit. Interviewing the personable Tottenham MP, David Lammy, on a panel earlier this month, I was amused to hear him let slip that the last election has resulted in "a fudge" (ie a coalition) and the next was very likely to do the same. It is a sign that the Labour leader still does not quite produce the "Yes he can" feeling in his own ranks, let alone decisive momentum in the country at large.

This is a bit worrying, given that in Mr Axelrod's view, his new protege is well placed to be a strong majoritarian figure. He has been impressed by Ed Miliband, he says, because the Labour leader has "taken on some powerful interests… that benefit from current policies". Those policies, Axelrod notes, "conspire against the majority". This is classic Labour-Democrat rhetoric, playing to a sense in the two centre-left parties that the status quo is stacked against the commonality and that helping voters to grasp this will take votes from the right-of-centre party. It is also a rather windy exercise, because even if we can come up with a list of "powerful interests" we distrust, the hard part is deciding what to do about them without being counterproductive. A prime example is Obama's healthcare reform, which aimed to sort out a major problem, only for it to end up so complicated and messy that White House strategists are enjoining Democrats to say as little as possible about it.

That brings me to Mr Miliband's deepest weakness, which is a lack of interest in innovation or ideas from outside a predictable menu of state intervention. It is not "taking on" powerful interests to embrace a price fix on energy bills – it is a short-termist ruse. Few people in the sector think it can do more than stave off price rises for a short while. Even fewer think there's a ready supply of new contenders to undercut the Big Six companies. Inconveniently, it turns out that Mr Axelrod helped a client company in America campaign to raise electricity prices, citing the need to secure energy supply. Travelling strategists tend to throw up such entanglements, precisely because they are guns for hire. Lynton Crosby, David Cameron's Australian guru, has brought similar embarrassments to the Tories. But the broader point is that Mr Miliband's stance takes scant account of the security pressures raised by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the argument that fracking might be the better long-term solution or the flagging case for renewables, on which he campaigned in his Green Ed phase for the Labour top job. Confused? You should be.

What has been achieved is a tactical advance, pushing the Conservatives on to the defensive on energy pricing. On this score, Messrs Miliband and Osborne are much more similar creatures than either would want to admit. The chancellor has specialised in creating problems for Labour in the last budget with a dashing play to the grey vote, in the form of an overhaul of onerous annuity regulations. Alas, this is laden with potentially scary consequences for the pension system, rushed through for purposes of political demarcation at the start of the election battle.

Those who care only about getting one or t'other party over the finishing line relish such manoeuvres. The rest of us are entitled to ask where the weaknesses lie. In Mr Miliband's case, portraying himself as the saviour of the common people against vague but almighty forces disguises a tendency towards parochialism, with the suggestion that a leftish Little Britain can insulate itself from the challenges and trends of a competitive world. The pressing matter of public services gets scant attention. Education is particularly poorly served. So far, the most we can safely say about Ed's plan for schools is that he would continue academies, but revert to some form of greater local authority control or some avatar thereof. We know that Labour will tolerate free schools, but with such a bad grace and so many strictures that not many more of them are likely to spring up than are in place when Mr Gove's days as the Great Educator are over.

It is not so much the detail of these positions that matters, but the lack of breadth, ambition or drive overall. Mr Miliband has diagnosed a nasty British ailment featuring low wages, low-quality jobs, low productivity. But if educational attainment is part of the solution – as it must be – it is hard to see what the force of his approach might be. Allowing the Tories to steal the mantle of raising school standards is a foolish shortcoming. I think it gets worse on universities. Having helped create a funding level and sensible long-term repayment mechanism that can just about sustain a halfway ambitious higher education system, and one that has not, as feared, discouraged poorer students from studying, the present approach tears up this cross-party consensus. Instead, Labour wants to offer a reduction of a third in tuition fees, in the manner of an end-of-season DFS sale.

The overall policy draft on this is a garble, which a seasoned senior Treasury source (by no means hostile to Labour) describes as "an absolute botch and a funding nightmare for the universities". The core message is awful. It makes people a promise that no government can fulfil – a quality higher education based on discounting fees that are already low by comparable international standards. For another, it creates a never-ending payback scheme, with a graduate tax that can be extended at whim, and deprives students of any sense of what it is they can be expected to repay, in return for what? Labour strategists will object that neither of these subjects will move many votes in marginal seats, but they underline a sense of flimsiness that Mr Miliband needs to shed if he is to become a more substantial figure, destined for Number 10.

The Labour leader has shown determination, guile and a sense of grievance – shared by many in the population. Yet what he does not yet look like is a man who can move from bemoaning the insecure state of the nation to dealing with the tougher calls of government. If he is to end up receiving President Obama's congratulations next May, credibility on that as well as ambition need to be Mr Miliband's goals. Mr Axelrod has his work cut out.