Nicholas Wapshott

Amid the triumphant acclamation and the reluctant resignation of the two presidential candidates’ early morning speeches was the hint that politics is about to take a strange turn. Mitt Romney’s concession address was suitably gracious and, above dissenting heckles from his disappointed party workers, he included this veiled job application: “Our leaders have to reach across the aisle to do the people’s work, and we citizens also have to rise to the occasion.”

Within half an hour President Barack Obama responded in kind. “I just spoke with Governor Romney and I congratulated him and Paul Ryan on a hard-fought campaign,” he said. “In the weeks ahead, I also look forward to sitting down with Governor Romney to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward.”

What do the two men have in mind? The role of defeated presidential candidate is a hard one to endure. America does not like losers, and those who fail to win the world’s most important office are given short shrift. Often they become bywords for has-beens and no-hopers, tacitly blamed for letting their ambitions run ahead of reality. George McGovern was a courageous man, a bomber pilot in World War Two who knew war from the inside and could not bear to see America’s young men sacrificed in a dubious cause. His reward after losing the 1972 race was ignominy and derision. The same was true of another war hero and failed presidential candidate, Bob Dole, in 1996, who became a spokesman for Viagra.

In 1988, Michael Dukakis’s failure to become president became the butt of gags in late-night comedians’ monologues. Al Gore, who won the popular vote, won Florida if the votes had been counted, and was only kept out of the White House in 2000 by an extraordinary decision of the Supreme Court that to this day cannot be read by the American people they claim to serve, fared even worse. After growing a beard, shedding his wife, Tipper, and putting on 100 pounds, he has floundered around, trying to find a role that befits a two-term vice president. Little wonder that Romney, as he takes off the motley, does not wish to join that sorry line of tragedians.

On the stump, Romney used to joke that he fully understands the unemployed because he has been unemployed for five years, since he stood down as the one-term governor of Massachusetts in 2007. More seriously, what does a man with a vast fortune, who doesn’t need to work, do after two failed runs at the presidency? Romney is 65 and in good shape. His religion and his upbringing suggest he should do something in the public good. But what? We have yet to discover what Obama said to Romney – and indeed to Paul Ryan – in the early hours of Nov. 7, but it is clear that there was something more than the usual niceties. There was none of the petulance on display in the snarling between Gore and George W. Bush that elicited the revealing reprimand from Gore, when he called to say he may have conceded too soon, “There’s no need to get snippy about it.” It seems from Obama’s victory speech that he reached out there and then to his old adversaries and in doing so set the tone for his second term.

The murder by Islamist terrorists of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks has become one of the most contentious issues in the election. The administration has been flailing around, unsure of its facts, offering statements that turned out to be misleading. Republicans, led by Senator John McCain, have jumped on the errors by the State Department and the CIA that contributed to the confusion over our understanding of the slaughter in Benghazi, and backed an unrelenting press campaign attempting to show Barack Obama as either incompetent, a liar, or both.

Yet, despite six weeks of heavy pounding on Obama’s approach to terrorism and national security, an issue that in the past has occupied Americans as a top priority, the president’s reputation remains largely unscathed and, according to polls, voters still consider him more suited than Mitt Romney to run America’s foreign and security policies. Why has such a virulent campaign to discredit Obama’s record as commander-in-chief so conspicuously failed?

When John McCain first commented on the death of his friend Ambassador Stevens, he was careful with his words. After a wild accusation by Mitt Romney condemning the U.S. embassy in Cairo for blaming anti-western mob violence across the Arab world on a video that made fun of the prophet Mohammad, the senator from Arizona was reluctant to apportion blame for the American deaths. Asked on Sept. 13 about the administration’s response to the killings, he said: “I think it was fine. By the way, Secretary of State Clinton gave a marvelous statement today.” By last weekend, however, he was accusing the administration of “either cover-up or gross — the worst kind of incompetence, which doesn’t qualify the president as commander in chief.”

There is the truth. Then there is the whole truth. Mitt Romney is still lagging behind the president in Ohio, the weather-vane state that has voted for every president since Abraham Lincoln and where Barack Obama is credited with saving millions of jobs in the auto industry. But the governor’s insistence in the second debate that Obama’s rescue of General Motors and Chrysler was the same as his plan was only half the story.

When Romney said “[W]hen you say that I wanted to take the auto industry bankrupt, you actually did. … That was precisely what I recommended and ultimately what happened,” he was leading voters to believe there was little difference between restructuring by the federal government car czar Steve Rattner and his own prescription: to let the firms go bust, let the markets clear, then reassemble the broken parts.

Romney’s surrogates blame a headline in The New York Times, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”, over an op-ed by Romney in October 2008 for fueling confusion over where their candidate really stands. The opening lines appear to contradict their version. “If General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for,” he wrote, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.” He went on to argue for a managed bankruptcy, but was vague about the role federal officials should play.

We are in the midst of a presidential race lacking in passion. After four years, with the economy languishing, the optimism Obama appeared to represent last time is absent. Democrats will go to the polls without a spring in their step, to keep Romney out rather than save Obama’s neck. Even the president himself, if his hangdog look in the first debate is any guide, has lost his mojo. Obama has achieved what Romney could not: He has angered his own supporters for not fighting hard enough for the ideas they cherish.

On the Republican side, conservatives and libertarians will vote for Romney more out of duty than in the belief he will represent their views in government. They feel the Republican establishment has foisted Romney upon them because he seemed likely to appeal to middle-ground voters who decide elections. They think his lack of genuine commitment to conservative ideology means he will win the White House, then ignore their wishes, just as the Bushes, father and son, did before him. Conservatives will be voting as much to prevent Obama’s second term as to elect Romney.

These seem the perfect circumstances for a third-party candidate. In fact there are others offering themselves as president, though you may be excused for not knowing their names. They include Gary Johnson of the Libertarians, Jill Stein of the Greens, even the comedienne Roseanne Bar, who promises to legalize marijuana, forgive student debt and end all wars. But none of the above, or a further seven nobodies on the ballot, stand a chance. Without billions to spend and a popular head of steam, they are ignored by the press and cannot penetrate the public consciousness.