AS MOST of you are reading the Variety today over your morning coffee, President Barak Obama is back in Charlotte, N.C., getting ready to deliver one of the most important speeches of his life.

As he wraps up the Democratic National Convention, will the President be able to make the case that the American people should return him to office for four more years ... and give him a congress he can work with?

Most of all, will he be able to convince a solid majority of voters that he has a plan to really get the American economy back on track ... not just for the billionaires, mega-banks and major corporations (most of whom are doing fabulously under his watch), but for construction workers, teachers, firefighters and police, independent shopkeepers, factory workers and family farmers ... the backbone of America?

It ought to be a slam dunk, especially given Obama’s basic likeability and outstanding oratory skills.

But for two big reasons it isn’t.

First, for all his hope and change progressive rhetoric, and for all the right wing cries of socialism, the President has basically governed as a traditional moderate Republican. From day one, his economic team has been made up almost exclusively of Wall Street insiders such as Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke ... not outstanding progressives he could easily have turned to, such as Nobel Prize winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.

Rather than being a full blown “New New Deal” that would have directly created a large number of jobs in a short period of time, his economic stimulus package was too small for the scale of the problem, and (in an effort to get Republican support) was heavily weighted towards tax cuts – the least cost effective way to stimulate an economy.

His much derided “Obamacare” isn’t anything like the “Medicare for all” national single payer system advocated by progressives. It is the conservative Heritage Foundation/Mitt Romney plan, adapted to the national stage, and vetted by the major insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Just this week, the New York Times ran a well-researched story outlining all the ways in which the domestic policies of Richard Nixon are well to the left of Obama.

Was the President just being pragmatic? Did he make the decision that these were the best deals he could get, and that – given the grave state of the economy in 2008 and early 2009 – taking action fast, even if it wasn’t the best action, was just too important to “let the perfect become the enemy of the good?”

Perhaps. But back then, the (national ... not Guam) Republican Party was rightly blamed for the mess their policies had created, and a strong push by Obama for the policies he had campaigned on might well have succeeded. Had he done so, it might have been the Main Street economy that recovered strongly, not just the Wall Street economy.

For reasons I will explore in future columns, the policies based on “trickle-down” economics, massive deregulation, and unfettered “free” trade that have been the bedrock of Republican philosophy since the Reagan years have been an unmitigated disaster for America’s middle class ... although they have worked perfectly for the ultra-rich. Democrats need to start governing as though they understand this if they want to win.

Second, the Republican Party has launched an unprecedented effort to tilt the playing field of this election. Since 2010, measures such as voter ID laws and limitation of early voting hours have been rammed through by Republicans in a number of states that threaten to disenfranchise millions of minority, elderly and student voters ... all of whom typically lean strongly Democratic.

As I mentioned in my last column, the people on the right have also shown an unprecedented willingness to pay fast and loose with the truth in this election cycle.

Worst of all, in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s astounding Citizen’s United decision, right wing billionaires such as the Koch brothers (whose father was a founder of the John Birch Society) and Casino magnate Sheldon Adleson are ready to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort to defeat President Obama, and his down-ticket Democratic supporters.

In short, they are literally trying to buy our democracy ... and in a television age, they just might succeed.