More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes?

I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem. He has not tied all his programmes into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.

Without it, though, the president’s eloquence, his unique ability to inspire people to get out of their seats and work for him, has been muted or lost in a thicket of technocratic details. His daring but discrete policies are starting to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through, and endlessly compromise over, just to finish for finishing’s sake — not because they are all building blocks of a great national project.

What is that project? What is that narrative? Quite simply it is nation-building at home. It is nation-building in America. I’ve always believed that Mr Obama was elected because a majority of Americans fear that we’re becoming a declining great power. Everything from our schools to our energy and transportation systems are falling apart and in need of reinvention and reinvigoration. And what people want most from Washington today is nation-building at home. Many people, including conservatives, voted for Barack Obama because in their hearts they felt he could pull us all together for that project better than any other candidate. Many are what I’d call “Warren Buffett centrists.” They are not billionaires, but they are people who believe in Mr Buffett’s saying that whatever he achieved in life was due primarily to the fact that he was born in this country — America — at this time, with all of its advantages and opportunities.

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