RUTHFULLY YOURS

If President Obama has taken such a meeting, there’s no hint of it. Both the Obama and Romney camps naturally predict victory, but the president’s men are a little more emphatic than their numbers warrant, which suggests they may be working hard to keep hope alive.

Mr. Obama will close his campaign Monday where it all started, with a rally in Des Moines after stops in Wisconsin and Ohio. The attention he’s paying to states he had locked up a fortnight ago tells a lot about how the campaign ends. Iowa can contribute only six votes to what the president expected would be a landslide.

The president has been to Iowa 11 times this year; Mr. Romney will make his 14th visit with a rally in Dubuque on Saturday. He will close on Monday in New Hampshire, fighting for four electoral votes. It may be a poetic way to end a long and contentious marathon, but sentiment has nothing to do with it. Neither man would be struggling in the dying hours of the campaign for nickels and dimes if the race were a settled issue.

The latest Iowa polls show an exceedingly tight race: A Marist poll, out Thursday, gives the president a 6-point lead, and a poll by the University of Iowa of the day before shows the president ahead only by 42.7 percent to 41 percent. Fighting for fractions is no portent of a landslide.

Nevertheless, some wise heads say they see the signs of a dramatic and decisive break toward the challenger. The important swing states, particularly Ohio, may have swung. Dick Morris, the campaign consultant turned pundit who invented Bill Clinton in Arkansas and in two presidential campaigns, has turned caution aside to speak of landslide, though he calls it a vote of “historic proportions.”

The campaign has reached a tipping point and it goes back to the first debate. “Reasonable voters saw that the voice of hope and optimism and positivism was Romney while the president was only a nitpicking, quarrelsome, negative figure,” he says. “The contrast does not work in Obama’s favor.”

Indeed. The Obama campaign spent a hundred million dollars on television advertising to paint Mitt Romney as an evil Wall Street villain, lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills, making the kids’ dog ride on the roof of the car. He was the kind of villain who would shoot Big Bird and serve it for supper with imported champagne. Then came the first debate, revealing Mitt Romney as an ordinary rich guy with beer and hamburger tastes like the rest of us. The president revealed himself spoiled and petulant, in a pout for his teleprompter and barely able to hide his irritation at having to answer questions like any other candidate. It’s been uphill for him since.

Mr. Romney slowly overtook the president in the polls, and has held a small but consistent advantage since. Over the past week, by the reckoning of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Romney has led in 19 of 31 national surveys, the president in only 7. Mr. Romney’s percentage has been above 50 percent in 10 of those polls, Mr. Obama’s in none.

“It comes down to numbers,” Karl Rove, the genius of George W. Bush’s two successful campaigns, writes in the Wall Street Journal. “And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney.”

Soon enough none of these numbers, accurate or not, will matter. We’ll vote and that will settle it. Only one prediction here: The electoral college, as it nearly always does, will follow the popular vote, and national popular vote will outperform the polls.

The polls have been skewed by fear. The mainstream media has been relentless with its message, abetted in ways large and small by the Obama campaign, that only bigots, churls and haters would vote against a black incumbent. This is the ultimate racism, that a failed black incumbent can’t be held to account like a failed white incumbent.

Numbers can lie, of course, but if President Obama pulls this one out, the numbers have told a whopper.