It's the nasty undercurrent to the US election, but could racism put Mitt Romney in the White House?

By David Jones In Cleveland, Ohio

PUBLISHED: 17:34 EST, 2 November 2012 | UPDATED: 00:15 EST, 3 November 2012

While Barack Obama abandoned the campaign trail earlier this week and retreated to Washington to oversee the storm-relief effort (doubtless hoping to persuade wavering voters of his leadership qualities in the process), the man who could blow him out of office next Tuesday knew exactly where he needed to be.

For more than a month now, Mitt Romney has been virtually encamped in Ohio, the too-close-to-call ‘swing-state’ that history decrees he must win if he is to reach the White House. And it was there I found him —  blue-check shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up ready for work — collecting donations for flood victims, in a high-school gym.

As part of his brilliantly calibrated autumn push that — together with Obama’s curiously disengaged and uninspiring performance on the stump — transformed the Republican challenger from no-hoper to narrow leader in the latest polls, Romney’s sense of place and timing was unerring.

Chiming effortlessly: Mitt Romney accepts food and supplies for storm victims at a rally in Kettering, Ohio

And though he was born to privilege as the son of a Detroit auto-industry tycoon and made his fortune as a supposedly hard-hearted, asset-stripping venture capitalist, as ever he chimed effortlessly with the  small-town, blue-collar folks whose votes will decide this election.

‘Thanks for your generosity, ma’am; real kind of you, sir,’ he repeated endlessly, his flinty eyes brimming with sincerity as he received clothes parcels, tinned food and other essentials for families left destitute by Superstorm Sandy.

Each donor was rewarded with the simple twin-courtesies that go such a long way in the Mid-West, a firm handshake and a broad smile. And everyone I spoke to after they left  the gym in Kettering, Ohio, was convinced they’d just met the next President of the United States. 

Overturning expectations: Romney has countered portrayals of him as a hard-hearted asset-stripping businessman

‘Isn’t he charming? Quite handsome, too,’ coos one middle-aged woman in shapeless blue jeans and a sensible, chunky-knit sweater — the standard outfit for Ohio mums.

‘Mighty impressive, sweetie,’ allows her gruff, baseball-hatted husband, who works at the huge Wright-Patterson US air force base and fears Obama’s military spending cuts could throw him on welfare.

Some 18 months ago, when I began covering the long battle for the Republican nomination, the  idea that Romney (who has promised to bolster America’s defence programme) might stir such adulation seemed unthinkable.

Autumn push: Once unelectable, Romney has transformed himself into a serious contender for the presidency

Though not so patently unelectable as some of the oddballs and extremists who first set out on the long road to the White House, the notion that this cheesy-grinning Mormon might garner enough support to deny Obama a second term was preposterous.

Even among his own party he was widely derided as a goofy, wooden character — Democrats claimed he was devoid of political or social convictions and would say whatever it took to win popularity, a tactic some suggested he’d learned as a door-knocking missionary in his youth.

But as I returned to America a few days ago to follow Romney on the stump in the final stages of the campaign — a worryingly nasty and polarised ideological showdown that will profoundly shape the long-term future for us all — I barely recognised him as the same candidate.

As someone who abhors many policies of the American Right — particularly on their opposition to issues such as abortion, gun-control and gay rights — I euphorically abandoned journalistic impartiality to cheer Obama’s ‘change has come’ victory speech on that epoch-making November night in Chicago in 2008.

The following day I even wore one of the cheap souvenir T-shirts being hawked by street-sellers outside the city’s Grant Park. Now it is stuffed away in a bedroom drawer.

For much as it pains me to say it, Obama today is a shadow of the messianic leader who promised a new dawn for America. And I am starting to understand why it is the Republican contender who is being hailed as the saviour now, especially in the beleaguered American heartland if not the big metropolitan melting pots where many still abstractedly believe in ‘hope’ and ‘change’.

How has this extraordinary transformation come about?

Let’s start with presentational style — crucially important in a nation where the president makes so many televised personal addresses and it is said people invariably elect the candidate who fits most comfortably into their living rooms. When Obama emerged on the scene, with his electrifying oratory, towering intellect, easy bonhomie and film-star looks, his appeal was almost universal. But watching him perform this week — greying and careworn — the charisma had faded.

Worse, many who backed him last time are actively hostile. In Ohio, I have heard time and again that he is ‘arrogant, aloof, superior, out of touch’ — ironic, given how he pledged to remove power from the Washington elite and hand it to ordinary people.

Peggy Noonan, a respected Wall Street Journal columnist, even ventured this week that the most exciting U.S. statesman since JFK has become ‘boring’. Obama ‘drones, he is predictable, it is never new’, she says, concurring with the veteran Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, who writes in a critical new book that the President’s ‘arrogance is greater than his grasp’.

A shadow: Barack Obama has gone from the contender with film-star looks and near-universal appeal (left) to a greying and careworn president who many think has failed to deliver (right)

By contrast, there is something rather intriguing, even endearing, these days about Romney. The antithesis of Obama in almost every conceivable way, he has cleverly capitalised on their differences.

While the President wears cool designer suits, Mitt’s clothes seem to come from a five-and-dime store. He sports a neat (and suspiciously jet-black) short-back-and-sides haircut, and he meanders off into homespun yarns about patriotic Boy Scouts and heroic astronauts — his words occasionally punctuated with a husky, Reagan-esque chuckle.

If all this makes him seem outdated, a throwback to the Fifties, that suits the folks of Ohio and other key states such as Wisconsin and Colorado, because they’re old-fashioned, too — and proud to be so.

‘I really like it that he’s clean-cut and traditional,’ says Abby Pytosh, a big-haired, snakeskin-booted account executive attending the storm fund-raising event in Kettering.

‘I’m 25 years old and I live in the 21st century but I don’t think that means we’ve got to give up on old-fashioned values. And, for me, Mitt Romney, not Barack Obama, represents those values.’

She says she is talking about issues such as abortion (Romney is pro-life, Obama pro-choice), and the government-funded Planned Parenthood birth-control programme to which many Mid-Western conservative women are vehemently opposed.

It's the economy, stupid: Voters will choose the candidate they think most able to restore America's prosperity

But in an often-echoed sentiment, she says she will also vote for Romney because he has the ‘hands-on business experience’ needed to turn the economy around, unlike Obama who has only ever worked as ‘a community activist’ and career politician.

For all the emotionally charged side-debates about immigration, terrorism, Afghanistan and the deeply divisive new health-insurance scheme for the poor, known as ‘Obamacare’, this election is all about the economy, of course.

The winner will be the man the electorate judges is best-equipped to restore America’s prosperity.

Exactly how the average voter is expected to make an informed choice, however, when rarely an hour passes without one candidate making some grandiose claim by way of a radio or TV commercial, only for the other to rubbish it, is anyone’s guess.

For example, will the newly resurgent Chrysler really throw Obama’s $80 billion federal auto-industry bailout back in his face by shifting its Jeep production to China, as Romney (who famously argued that the industry should have been left to go bankrupt) claims in one of his latest ads?

Or rather, as both the President and the company itself insist, is this just baloney?

In Ohio, where motor manufacturing provides one in eight jobs and unemployment is only slightly below the 7.8 per cent national average, this is a matter of great importance.

Yet, as so often in this mud-slinging campaign, voters are being presented with two contradictory ‘truths’ and so, in their confusion, they revert to old partiality and prejudice.

This spells more trouble for Obama. Four years ago, a sizeable proportion of the white electorate — sick to the teeth of George W. Bush and hoping the economy  had bottomed out — bought into his dream.

But in many places the spirit of integration has vaporised and, as the U.S. media are reluctantly  beginning to acknowledge, it seems race could be a significant factor in the result.

This sorry assertion isn’t based on solely the ugly slogans one sees all too often at Romney rallies (such as the sickening favourite: ‘Put the White back In the White House’). It is supported by hard facts.

In 2008, Obama won 43 per cent of the white vote; this time just 37 per cent support him, according to the latest polls, and pundits believe his re-election is in serious jeopardy unless he can increase that figure.

CNN political analyst L.Z. Granderson says: ‘What we’re beginning to see is that the Republicans are increasingly white, while the Democrats are losing the white people.’

Explaining this racial schism, Mark Anthony Neal, cultural and black studies professor at Duke University in North Carolina, says white voters have allowed Obama less time to turn the economy around than they would have given a white president.

‘It’s not so much that they are voting for Romney because he is white, but the economy protects them [from charges of being racist],’ he says.

‘They don’t have to feel guilty because of the economy. The economy lets them off the hook.’

This may be true, but in the school gyms of Ohio this week the bigotry was more visceral. ‘Better a Mormon than a Muslim!’ snapped Phil Eldridge, a 53-year-old construction worker, when I asked what he thought of Romney’s religion.

Another Mitt supporter, a 50-year-old mother of four complained she was not only paying to put her children through college but, thanks to Obama’s inclusive education programme, she was paying for ‘millions of poor [subtext black] kids, too’.

Then there was my waitress Tabitha at KC’s Steak and Rib House in Bellville, Ohio. Another mother of four, she regaled me with outlandish conspiracy theories. Obama, she said earnestly, was ‘not even American’ — he had been born overseas and sent by Islamic terrorists to ruin the country.

This would doubtless amuse black leaders, who ironically accuse the President of being so unfailingly impartial that he has failed to do enough for their various social causes. 

I was tempted to laugh at Tabitha’s McCarthyite mumbo-jumbo, but it really wasn’t funny because in the backwoods towns where the election will be won and lost it has become alarmingly mainstream.

Does Obama, despite his many failings, deserve a second chance?

Hamstrung for the past two years by an antagonistic Republican Congress, has he made the best of the bad hand he was dealt by President Bush, as he insists?

Did he set our expectations so high, with his message of hope and change, that we have overlooked his achievements, as laid out in the Democratic Party circular I received this week that listed no fewer than 39 of them, from improving women’s rights to killing Osama bin Laden?

Or rather, is it time to give the other guy a go: the old-fashioned one who knows a thing or two about turning around ailing businesses and promises to do the same for USA Inc.?

Three days from now, America will make its choice. The smart money says Obama will scrape home, saved perhaps by the great storm that has given him the opportunity to reassert his command on camera, just when it matters.

But if Mother Nature fails to save him from the ignominy of a one-term presidency, history will trace his demise to the anger and disillusion voiced in dozens of school gyms in places like Kettering, Ohio.