IT'S A tricky time, the period from the end of the primary season to the start of the political conventions.
Sultry weather settles in, vacation beckons, and public attention wanes. Breaking through is hard to do.
Still, Barack Obama has used the lazy days of summer to considerable advantage with a series of speeches aimed at rooting himself in mainstream American values.
"One of the most important qualities that people look for in a president is someone who shares their values, and Obama is showing them that he does," says Democratic strategist John Sasso, who has played an important role in almost every presidential campaign of the last quarter-century.
Adds Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin, formerly a senior strategist for Hillary Clinton's campaign: "At the presidential level, there is a greater concern with understanding what makes somebody tick and whether they are motivated and driven by the same kind of values voters themselves have."
Obama has striven to show that he is. In a pre-Fourth of July address about patriotism in Independence, Mo., the Democratic candidate spoke about all this country means to him, crediting the American ethos for his own success. It "is this essential American idea - that we are not constrained by the accident of birth but can make of our lives what we will - that has defined my life, just as it has defined the life of so many other Americans," he said.
Now, it's a sad commentary that someone could find his love of country doubted because, say, he hasn't always worn a flag pin; an obsession with that sartorial standard is the starboard-side equivalent of the lefty political correctness that conservatives regularly decry. Still, past experience has shown that such attacks can hurt.
"We all learned from 1988," says Mike Dukakis, who as that year's Democratic nominee found his patriotism assailed. "They are going to do everything that they can to make sure that what happened to me doesn't happen to them."
Obama took another important step when he used a Father's Day appearance at a black church - and his own history as a son who grew up without his dad - to highlight the problem of fatherlessness in the African-American community and to stress paternal responsibility.
"Any fool can have a child," he said in one attention-getting passage. "That doesn't make you a father. It's the courage to raise a child that makes you a father."
And when Jesse Jackson's sotto voce sneer gave Obama another opportunity to highlight his responsibility theme, he took it. "I know there's some who've been saying I've been too tough, talking about responsibility," he said in a speech Monday to the NAACP. "I'm here to report I'm not going to stop talking about it."
With that, Obama delivered a crisp message about both his values and his determination.
"Strength, character, and leadership are the qualities that people attribute to successful candidates, and he's shown that," says Sasso. "That's important, because this period in the campaign is a race to define yourself and your values before other people do it for you."
Values are not the only threshold test, of course. Also vital is whether a candidate strikes voters as a credible commander in chief. That's where Republican John McCain has focused a good deal of his energy - and where he has reason to be pleased. A recent Gallup poll shows that 80 percent of Americans think McCain can handle the role, compared with 55 percent who say the same about Obama.
With his coming trip to Europe and the Middle East - with expected stops in Iraq and Afghanistan - Obama is hoping to enhance his own national security credentials. Whether he can remains to be seen - but the mere fact that he is undertaking such a trek under the bright campaign spotlight bespeaks a certain confidence.
As he heads off, Obama has every right to be pleased with his impressive summer performance.
Correction: In my last column, I botched a reference to a slur from the 1884 campaign, which saw a supporter of Republican James G. Blaine charge that the Democratic Party's antecedents were "rum, Romanism, and rebellion."
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com
