Obama is the wiser bet for crisis-hit US

This year’s US presidential election has been a dispiriting affair.

Compared with 2008, when Barack Obama emerged triumphant against all the early odds, the 2012 campaign has offered little inspiration, still less instruction, on what Mr Obama or his Republican rival Mitt Romney would actually do in office.

Yet Tuesday’s election is arguably as important as any since 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s victory accelerated a shift to deregulation and supply-side economics. Today, after the Great Crash of 2008, the US economy is recovering, albeit too slowly for many Americans out of work or in search of a decent-paying job. US pre-eminence is under threat in a world where advanced knowledge is widespread and low-cost labour readily available. In Afghanistan, the Middle East, north Africa and the South China Sea, America’s resolve is being tested.

Neither candidate has provided convincing answers on how he would respond to these challenges. In a risk-averse campaign dominated by political consultants, both men have displayed a poverty of ambition. There have been few glimpses of a better future, of opportunities to be seized thanks to cheap natural gas and America’s potential for energy self-sufficiency.

What is clear is that both men have a different philosophy of government. Mr Obama is an interventionist. He staked all on healthcare reform, bringing 30m Americans into a safety net. The president also pushed through a $787bn stimulus package that saved the country from another Great Depression. He poured billions into rescuing the Detroit car industry and secured several hundred thousand jobs. His other legacy is the Dodd-Frank act, the most sweeping reform of Wall Street since the 1930s, though one which has only been fitfully implemented.

Yet Mr Obama has often been curiously aloof. He has been notably cool toward business. The self-proclaimed agent of change has at crucial points failed to exercise leadership. He declined to endorse the Simpson-Bowles bipartisan panel’s recommendations on cutting the ballooning federal deficit. The White House blames the implacable wall of opposition from Republicans in Congress. However, Mr Obama himself commissioned the report. The US now faces a “fiscal cliff” on January 1, which could trigger swingeing spending cuts and tax increases that could plunge the country back into recession.

On foreign affairs, Mr Obama has displayed caution after the misadventures of the Bush administration. He has withdrawn US forces from Iraq and drawn down troops in Afghanistan. He has pursued a relentless covert war against al-Qaeda terrorists and suspects. He boldly hunted down Osama bin Laden. He has been on the right side of the Arab uprisings. On Iran, perhaps the next administration’s biggest foreign policy challenge, he has negotiated much tougher economic sanctions – without, however, slowing decisively the Tehran regime’s plans to build a nuclear bomb.

Mr Romney’s foreign policy proclamations have been far less reassuring. He has been needlessly belligerent. His advisers have a neocon hue. Yet the Obama campaign’s attempts to cast Mr Romney as a billionaire predatory capitalist are surely wide of the mark. His Bain Capital experience and his term as governor of Massachusetts suggest a man comfortable with exercising executive power.

The more serious objection to Mr Romney is that he has gone through so many contortions to win his party’s nomination that it is hard to see how he would govern in practice. His wishlist includes an aspiration to raise Pentagon spending by a fifth while cutting everyone’s taxes and still somehow balancing the books. Such fiscal alchemy is an exercise in evasion, not a recipe for sustainable economic recovery.

Mr Romney’s latest positioning as a pragmatic centrist appears to fit far better than his earlier incarnation as a rock-ribbed conservative Republican beholden to the Tea Party. The trouble is that it is impossible to be sure. His protean persona relies more on market research than any innate political philosophy.

As in his response to Hurricane Sandy, Mr Obama has shown that purposeful government can be part of the solution rather than the problem. Four years on from the financial crisis, with extreme inequality an affront to the American dream, there remains a need for intelligent, reformist governance. Mr Obama, his presidency defined by the economic crisis, looks the better choice.