Maureen Dowd Op-Ed Columnist The Loin King

NOT since Lydia Bennet eloped with Mr. Wickham, not since Anna Karenina ran off with Count Vronsky, has such a hue and cry been heard about purloined affections. 

The triangle that flared at the climax, with Chris Christie scampering away from Mitt Romney in the wuthering storm to cling to Barack Obama, the New Jersey governor’s brown eyes looking up trustingly into the president’s brown eyes, added a frisson to a jaundiced, spendthrift race. 

In novels and movies, it’s a powerful narrative: the problems of three little people, playing out against a charged backdrop. “Casablanca.” “Gone With the Wind.” “The Year of Living Dangerously.” “Broadcast News.” “L.A. Confidential.” 

Christie was unrepentantly swept away by his new pal, the commander in chief, who also likes to wear a jacket with his name and title sewn onto the lapel. 

“So, I do pinch myself every day,” Christie said at a news conference in Trenton on Wednesday. “You know, like when I got on Marine One, I’m pinching myself, believe me. Sandy and Bill Christie’s son on Marine One was not exactly what I thought was going to be happening with my life.” 

A president who has taken a lot of abuse from Republicans — one refusing to take his urgent calls on the debt deal, one yelling “You lie!” during a State of the Union address, many libeling his religion, race and nationality, all plotting to upend his plans — was finally getting a little G.O.P. love. 

It was a jarring sign to Republicans that, despite Romney’s humanlike performance in recent weeks, there is no deep tie, nor real respect, among many of those helping with his campaign, even men considered as running mates. Romney is idolized by his wife and sons, and in his close Mormon circle of friends, but beyond that, there is an intensity vacuum. 

In the final days, with Christie cheating on him, Mitt was left with Jeb Bush, who offered the faint praise to CBS News that Romney had been slow to respond to the president’s attack but had finally “found his rhythm.” 

Pity poor Jeb Bush, trying to drag another entitled, second-rate scion over the finish line in Florida while stifling his own dreams. He told a crowd that Obama’s “entire strategy is to blame others, starting with my brother, of course.” But his brother is to blame for creating the chaos that swallowed much of Obama’s first term. And for derailing Jeb’s career and blighting the family name. While Jeb was hawking Romney, W. was giving a speech at a confidential Cayman Islands investment conference. He should go check on Mitt’s cash still sunning itself in the Caribbean. 

Even some of Romney’s own campaign advisers confess they don’t really know who he is. Is he the pragmatist who would curb Grover Norquist, John Bolton and Dan Senor, or the severe conservative who would let them run wild? It’s sad when you are hoping someone is an opportunist and a liar.

Some of Romney’s staffers seemed taken aback by his commanding performance in the first debate, musing about whether, had there been 47 percent fewer gaffes, the rich stiff actually could have had a chance of easily sending Obama packing. 

(Maybe Mitch McConnell and other Republicans would prefer that a Democrat keep the White House, given that the out-of-power party might pick up more Congressional seats in the midterms — not to mention how actually enacting the Romney-Ryan agenda could make the G.O.P. a minority party.)

Having Christie go rogue — and Colin Powell and Michael Bloomberg cross over from wherever they were — was a compelling plot twist in a race that has looked more to the gutter than the stars. Two uninspiring candidates, one Americans had fallen out of love with, one they could not fall in love with, one who had lost his narrative, one who offered a narrative with Janus faces and contradictory and occluded positions. 

 

The only thing about Romney that doesn’t oscillate, besides the exact quota of salt to pepper in his hair, is his weight. He told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that he regularly gets on the scale on the campaign trail to make sure he doesn’t deviate too much. If only his consistency extended to his positions on the auto bailout, abortion, climate change, gun control, health care, etc.

Romney’s closing argument was that he could spark a stagnant economy, but his false claim that Jeep jobs were moving from the United States to China was a huge mistake, allowing the big car companies to call him out as a liar. Obama found his fire in castigating Romney, saying, “You don’t scare hard-working Americans just to scare up some votes.” 

Voting for either man seems a shot in the dark. You have to make that vote still confused about who they are, how they’ve evolved, and where they’re leading us. You have to make that vote without knowing if either would have the mettle, as president for the next four years, to face down destructive forces and restore America’s luster. 

“After four years as president,” Obama told voters in Hilliard, Ohio, on Friday, “you know me.”

But do we? If we know him, why does he seem so much slighter than the Barack Obama who thrilled the country a mere four years ago? 

If we know him, why were we so stunned at his crimped, self-destructive performance in the first debate, when the man usually so in control of his emotions could not contain his contempt that he was expected to justify himself while this superrich, superphony, supercilious Republican dauphin stared at him with a smarmy smile? Barry used a vulgarity about Mitt to Rolling Stone, expressing the way he truly feels, but out campaigning the past few days, he toned it down, noting that his rival tried to “massage the facts” while “I tell the truth.” 

After his despondent debate and his disheartened remark that “You can’t change Washington from the inside,” the graying president has to spend his last campaign hours exhorting until he’s hoarse, working to reassure us that he’s still interested in his job. “I am a long ways away from giving up on this fight,” he said in Springfield, Ohio, on Friday. “I got a lot of fight left in me.” 

When a skeptical supporter pressed, “You’re not too tired?” the president responded: “I don’t get tired. I don’t grow weary. I hope you aren’t tired either, Ohio.” 

David Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed medium, strained to paint the president as filled with vigor, telling reporters in Lima, Ohio, that Obama’s exhilaration “is coming from his loins.” Twitter users quickly dubbed the president the Loin King. 

The campaign played Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” at rallies in 2008 too, but in Ohio in 2012, the words have a more wistful ring to them: “Like a fool I went and stayed too long. Now I’m wondering if your love’s still strong.” 

CAMPAIGNING in Lake Worth, Fla., on Friday, Bill Clinton, as usual, lavished Obama with support that contained a sting: “I may be the only person in America, but I am far more enthusiastic about President Obama this time than I was four years ago.” 

It is clear now that we elected an introvert, which is strange, and a leader who is depleted, rather than recharged, by politics and crowds. As Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former Obama adviser, told New York magazine: “It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is that it’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers.” 

Obama denounces Romney as “a very talented salesman,” which he considers an insult. At the same time, he admits that his ineptness at selling his policies left him in need of someone like Bill Clinton, who could be a “secretary of ’splaining stuff.” 

As the former community organizer deftly handled the devastation of Sandy — showing all the fleet response and caring reactions that he had lacked during the BP oil spill — and pressed the case that “we’re all in this together,” it seemed as though the president had learned some things about communicating and confidently using the levers of government. And that he understood that Americans will expect more from him if he is re-elected. 

But I couldn’t help thinking of a “Star Trek” episode, “The Naked Time,” in which the starship Enterprise sends crew members to a dying planet. The spaceship is contaminated by a strange red liquid that causes everyone to emote like crazy. Even Spock starts crying inconsolably because he can’t tell his mother how much he cares about her.  

Spock and Captain Kirk fiddle with the matter and antimatter and get away but fall into a time warp and hurtle back 71 hours, so the emotional outpouring never happened.

Has President Spock, who bounded into action on Sandy and rocked a New Jersey woman in his arms, really grown? Or is he giving us what we want for the moment so we’ll give him what he wants for the next four years?