Logic says otherwise, but this fool reckons President will win

Don't ever underestimate the potential for a surprise. I say this as a humiliated veteran of the 2008 New Hampshire primary race. Barack Obama had won the Iowa caucuses one week before and all the polls said he was going to thrash Hillary Clinton in the Granite State. Reporters believed it. We were burned. She won.

Mrs Clinton took New Hampshire because she cried in a café. But in the end, the soaring ‘Yes We Can’ rhetoric was too much for the former first lady just as it turned out to be for John McCain in the election. Barack the campaigner could do no wrong. Mr Obama is on the floor above me in this hotel. Today I will watch as Bruce Springsteen warms up the crowd for him in a town square in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. Yesterday I listened as Mr Obama sought to stir a crowd of 16,000 in the heart of Concord in the self-same New Hampshire. Was the old magic back?

I am hardly the first to conclude that the old Barack is missing in action as we enter the final, frenzied hours of campaign 2012.That old “urgency of now” is gone and so has his near-Messianic skill with the vocal cords. It shouldn’t be a surprise, perhaps. Last time he could promise what he liked. If he seems flatter it is because the record is fighting the rhetoric — he has disappointed.

And have those wizards who surrounded him in 2008 and who are on Air Force One today — David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Robert Gibbs — served him well this time? Couldn’t they have foreseen how Mitt Romney would transform himself once his primary battles were over and move towards the middle? They let the boss underperform in Denver, overdo the nastiness against his rival and omit to offer a real vision for a second term.

Tonight, Mr Obama concludes his re-election campaign in Des Moines, Iowa, where his journey of hope and change began in those early days of 2008. Is this superstition — grasping for the same winds of fortune that propelled him to the White House the first time around — or will it prove more a stroke of tragic symmetry? His last appearance as a candidate may also turn out to be the punctuation point of his dream.

Tomorrow night the results will unfold on those giant iPad walls on the networks. Results from counties in states like Ohio will pop up and the pundits will waver. Watching will be as agonising as Murray against Federer. Yet how is it, for all that I know from four years ago, that I sit here now and tell you that the man thumping on the ceiling above me is the one who will win? Because I am a fool. But I think I am right.