DOWD: Mitt struggles to move likeability needle

Isn’t it amazing? Two introverts facing off in the brightest spotlight of all for president.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are at their most appealing when they are with their families.

Unfortunately, we don’t often get that vantage point. And beyond those circles of trust, both men can seem as if they are sealed in their own spaceships.

The big difference, the one that will probably decide this presidential race, is this: Barack Obama is able to convey an impression of likability to voters. Given how private he is, an enigma even to some who are close to him, it’s an incredible performance.

That likability slips through your hands at closer range. The president survived a “raised by wolves” upbringing, as Michelle has called it. He retained the monastic skills that sustained him through the solitude of his years in New York. His “winning smile,” as Jonathan Alter wrote in “The Promise,” “obscured a layer of self-protective ice.” His staffers respect him, but he doesn’t inspire the kind of adoration that the Bush presidents got.

He can be thin-skinned and insecure at times, but he radiates self-sufficiency, such a clean, simple aesthetic that he could have been designed by Steve Jobs—Siri without the warmth.

Yet voters see something genuine, and that is why Obama seems to be surviving the stalled economy and his own chuckleheaded remark: “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

A recent USA Today/Gallup poll showed Romney with higher marks on fixing the deficit, jobs, taxes and the economy. But Obama soared on personal traits—maintaining a 30-point advantage in likability, and better numbers on honesty, trust and empathy.

Romney advisers attributed his free fall in the polls to brass-knuckle Obama ads and summer doldrums rather than Mitt dullness. Maybe voters think Romney is already so sheathed in secret bubbles—Bain, Mormonism, his stint as governor of a liberal state—that electing him to the biggest bubble of all, the White House, would not be a good idea.

Some say Romney waited too long to put up his biographical ads and give personal interviews, letting himself be defined and slimed by the Obama ads.

Once a candidate gains the advantage in “Who do you want to have a beer with?”—even if he doesn’t drink beer—it’s very hard to reverse.

When Obama does rough ads, it allays the fear that he’s the sort who can get rolled by the banks, by the generals, by the Republicans in the House. When Romney does rough ads, it reinforces the fear that he’s unfeeling and a bit of a bully marketed by political mercenaries.

Will Mitt’s new mate, Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, make his run more personable?

You can bolster your relatability with your No. 2 pick, at least with certain demographics, as Obama did with Joe Biden. But Americans like to like their president. “You can’t outsource likability,” Emanuel says. “You can’t have an offshore account for it in the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands.”

Romney’s all-business/all-family rigidity makes him seem inaccessible. And his tax legerdemain has made him seem shady. As Marc Wolpow, a former Romney employee at Bain Capital, said in a Boston Globe story about Mitt’s 1988 deal with Michael Milken while the junk bond king was under federal investigation: “Mitt, I think, spent his life balanced between fear and greed. He knew that he had to make a lot of money to launch his political career. It’s very hard to make a lot of money without taking some kind of reputational risk along the way.”

Obama lost the thread of his narrative of hope and change, and Romney never developed one, even on his supposed specialty, the economy.•

• Dowd is a New York Times columnist. Send comments on this column to ibjedit@ibj.com.