FOR a generation or more, liberals have complained that the Republican Party uses social and cultural debates to distract voters from pocketbook issues. From Howard Dean’s 2003 lament about Southerners voting on “race, guns, God and gays” to Thomas Frank’s musings on what’s supposedly the matter with Kansas, the Republican focus on social issues has been regularly portrayed as a bait-and-switch, designed to bamboozle Americans into voting against their economic interests.

In 2012, though, liberals have learned to stop worrying and love the social issues. Ever since Rick Santorum’s campaign provided an opportunity to paint Republicans as nostalgists for the Comstock laws (if not the Inquisition), the Obama White House has consistently sought to change the subject from the unemployment rate to contraception, or immigration, or now even gay marriage.
For the president, talking about social issues is a way to activate key constituencies (young people, Hispanics, unmarried women) and woo crucial donor bases (he raised $15 million at a Hollywood fund-raiser after giving his support to same-sex wedlock). Above all, though, it’s a way to talk about something — anything! — besides his economic record.

It must be said that the White House has executed this strategy effectively. Twice in the last few months, a cultural controversy has threatened President Obama with embarrassment or worse: first in January, when the health care mandate requiring most religious employers to pay for sterilization, contraception and the morning-after pill prompted a chorus of opposition, and then again a week ago when it became clear that the media would no longer give the president cover for his “evolving” position on gay marriage.

In both cases, though, Obama quickly regained the initiative. In the case of the mandate, he combined a hasty compromise proposal with a “war on women” counterattack — and received a crucial gift from Rush Limbaugh, whose “slut” monologue seemed to vindicate the White House’s portrayal of its opponents as troglodytes and bigots.

In the case of gay marriage, meanwhile, Obama benefited from the press’s eagerness to cover capital-H History, earning a wave of glowing publicity for what amounted to a tacit admission that he had been deceiving voters about his convictions all along. And again, the White House benefited from an unexpected political gift, this time from a Washington Post story on Mitt Romney’s teenage bullying of a (possibly gay) prep school classmate.
The question, though, is what this successful maneuvering is actually gaining the White House. The weaknesses it’s trying to exploit are real enough: the country is moving leftward on many social issues, and Romney’s mix of squareness and weirdness — the moneyed background, the Mormonism, the 1950s persona — makes it relatively easy to portray him as culturally out of touch.

But this would be a bigger problem for Republicans if the 2012 campaign were taking place amid prosperity and plenty. At times, the Obama White House seems to be attempting to run a liberal version of George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, which used cultural arguments to delegitimize Michael Dukakis. But today’s economic landscape looks more like 1992, when Bush the elder discovered that the same arguments availed him little with a recession-weary electorate — even in a race against a slick, womanizing draft-dodger.

Making Americans feel uncomfortable with Romney, in other words, won’t be enough if the economy keeps sputtering along. What Obama needs, instead, is to make voters fear a Romney presidency, even more than they fear four more years of high deficits and slow growth. And a re-election campaign that focuses on gay marriage, or the Dream Act, or birth control, or how Romney treated his dog and high school classmates is unlikely to stoke that kind of fear.

What might? Well, in a pocketbook election it helps to focus on pocketbook anxieties. It’s true that every day the White House spends talking about social issues is a day it isn’t stuck talking about the economy. But it’s also a day when it hasn’t talked about how Mitt Romney wants to take away your retirement security to pay for tax cuts for the rich.
This is a predictable Democratic argument, and a demagogic one. But it’s an argument that might actually make economically stressed Americans afraid of what a Romney presidency would bring.

Instead, Obama is currently running for re-election as an opponent of sexism, homophobia and social reaction in all its forms. This is a decent strategy for winning news cycles, which the administration clearly did last week — playing the media brilliantly and watching as Romney was thrown on the defensive yet again.

But Obama has won news cycle after news cycle this spring, and yet the president and his unloved, out-of-step-with-the-times challenger are almost dead even in the polls. That’s a sign that something isn’t working — and that this White House, not for the first time, has mistaken a clever strategy for a winning one.