Matt Bai of the New York Times sees “murmurs” of a primary challenge against President Obama after he cut a deal with congressional Republicans to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy for two years in exchange for a 13-month unemployment extension, a payroll tax cut and other tax breaks designed to stimulate job growth. As angry as some liberals are, there isn’t a lot of there there — the article quotes two Huffington Post blogs, a Washington Post op-ed and the head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who said he isn’t advocating a primary challenge.

Massachusetts Rep. Mike Capuano said he “may or may not” support Barack Obama’s reelection, but he’s not known for holding his tongue. Moreover, Rep. Alcee Hastings (Fla.) said the same thing over the summer. It’s just talk.

Meanwhile, President Obama has an 80 percent approval rating among self-identified liberals, and liberal icons like Sen. Russ Feingold (Wis.) and Howard Dean have unequivocally said they won’t challenge him.

On the other hand, there have been dozens of articles about how a tea party leader, Judson Phillips, endorsed Sarah Palin and then Saul Anuzis for Republican National Committee chairmanship, implying that the tea party supports him. Only problem is, he leads a for-profit tea party  group that has minimal connections to the rest of the movement — only six out of 647 tea party groups surveyed by the Washington Post said they had ties to the group, and his attempt to hold a big tea party convention in Las Vegas fell through after the first had ticket prices of $550 and donated $100,000 to Palin.

It’s not that memes can’t turn out to be wrong, but these lines of speculation were largely invented out of nothing.

Obama’s calm vibe is a recurring theme in campaign coverage. Flying on his plane this season, I have often been struck by his relative serenity amid his hard-working aides, amped supporters and the constant surveillance of the traveling press. Another writer on the plane, Jeff Zeleny, captures Obama’s aura in a contemplative article for today’s New York Times:

While Mr. Obama smiles less than he once did, gauging his mood simply by looking at him is risky: his baseline cool temperament has seldom spiked along the rocky points of his journey …. Whatever emotions or anxiety Mr. Obama feels as his candidacy draws to a close, he displays little of it, either in public appearances or private conversations with his close advisers.

That demeanor is quite unusual in presidential candidates.  Matt Bai, another Times writer, recently studied how Obama’s unflappable calm plays on the trail, both as a clear strength and potential shortcoming:

It is often said in politics that a candidate’s strength is also his weakness. Obama’s greatest asset as a candidate, the trait that has enabled him to overcome both a thin résumé and the resistance of his own party’s establishment, is his placidity. Even more than through his ability to give a rousing speech … Obama has differentiated himself from recent Democrats by conveying a sense of inner security that is highly unusual in a business of people who have chosen to spend every day asking people to love them … Obama is content to meet the world on his terms, and something about that inspires confidence.

And yet that same lack of pathetic neediness may in fact be a detriment when it comes to persuading voters who, culturally or ideologically, just aren’t predisposed to like him. I once heard a friend of Obama’s compare him with Bill Clinton this way: if Clinton sees you walking down the other side of the street, he immediately crosses over to shake your hand; if Obama sees you coming, he nods and waits for you to cross. That image returned to me as I watched Obama campaign [recently in Virginia]. Clinton wouldn’t have wanted to leave that gym until every last voter had been converted … Obama doesn’t connect to the world that way, which is probably why his campaign has always preferred big rallies to hand-to-hand venues. Obama gives the impression that he’s going to show up and make his case, and if you don’t fall in love with him, well, he’ll just have to pick up the pieces and go on. (emphasis added).

Obama has been this way during his entire time on the national stage — an incredibly intense though relatively brief period.

When most candidates were maxing out their retail politicking during the Iowa caucuses, showing signs of Bai’s “pathetic neediness,” Obama was the candidate of negative space. The Democratic star conveyed power, as my friend Eli Sanders wrote at the time, through that restraint:

His power and his allure are in his restraint, in its implicit promise that there is something more to him, something different, something that seems new but is actually old. It’s that seemingly paradoxical thing that used to draw people to America: soft power.

As the entire world looks to Obama in these last, tense days of a momentous campaign, it’s really no surprise that Obama is characteristically calm, with his equilibrium perfectly intact.

One passage really caught my eye,  because I attended the same small-town Obama event in southwestern Virginia that Bai describes. Pardon the long excerpt, but Bai does some great storytelling:

If you want to get to Lebanon, a town of about 3,200, the easiest way is to fly into the Tri-City Airport on the Tennessee side of the Appalachians, then drive about 45 minutes northeast through some of the most gorgeous hill country in America. The back road that leads to Lebanon High School is lined with trailer-size houses on the edge of collapse, their front porches buckling in the sun. But then, as you approach the school, you see a few neat rows of brand new town houses, with prices in the high $200,000s — the unmistakable landscape of the new economy. Lebanon is slowly becoming a symbol of hope for towns all over the region that dream of turning southwestern Virginia, with its abundant land and cheap labor, into the next high-tech hub. Local counties have raised up a half-dozen “shell buildings” — essentially empty warehouses already connected to sewers and broadband lines — to attract businesses looking for ready-made space. Inspired by the influx of tech jobs, officials in the area have started what they call the Return to Roots program, in which they aggressively seek out qualified graduates who have moved away for other jobs and try to lure them back home.

Barack Obama came to Lebanon High for a town-hall meeting with voters on the Tuesday after Labor Day, marking the first time any presidential candidate stepped foot in the area since Jimmy Carter came to nearby Castlewood in 1976. The campaign made tickets available to its local offices a few days before the event, and a lot of the roughly 2,400 attendees waited in line to get them. As a result, most of the voters in the school gymnasium seemed to be committed Obama backers already.

Sen. Barack Obama at a townhall meeting in Lebanon, Va. (flickr)

The program opened with the validators. This is a critical part of Obama’s small-town strategy — getting respected surrogates to stand up and say that Obama is a guy you can trust. The first person on stage was Ralph Stanley, the 81-year-old legendary bluegrass musician, who was born in nearby Stratton and makes his home in Dickenson County. He unfolded a piece of paper and read, in a shaky voice: “I want to endorse Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Thank you very much!” The gymnasium exploded. (When the candidate met Stanley backstage, Obama told him that he had some of Stanley’s banjo music on his iPod. Stanley nodded appreciatively, but a few minutes later he turned to a friend and asked, “What’s an iPod?”)

Stanley was followed by Cecil Roberts, the white-bearded president of the mineworkers’ union, who preached as if he were at a revival, putting Obama’s early years into a framework that southwestern Virginians could understand. “Moses was a community organizer!” Roberts thundered. “And yes, Jesus was a community organizer!” Then came Rick Boucher, the owlish congressman who represents Lebanon and its surrounding counties in Washington. “Senator Obama is a friend of coal and the thousands of jobs it brings to southwestern Virginia,” Boucher assured the crowd. In fact, he repeated this line — “Barack Obama is a friend of coal” — no less than five times in 10 minutes.

Obama finally bounded onstage to an ovation that rocked the bleachers. He delivered a newly sharpened version of his basic rally speech, pacing the stage as he spoke, his pitch rising as he punctuated each point in a long list of indictments against the Bush years and John McCain. He stressed his own American story — the mother on food stamps, the grandfather who fought in “Patton’s army,” the father-in-law who worked a shift job with multiple sclerosis and never missed a day. The speech wasn’t appreciably different from one he would have given at an arena packed with 20,000 people in Philadelphia or St. Louis.

It was only after the speech, prompted by questions from the audience, that Obama tried to reassure the crowd — without ever referring to the “bitter” comment, of course — that he was not some San Francisco liberal who pitied rural people for their religiosity and their pastimes. One man wanted to know what Obama thought of those who looked down on Sarah Palin because she was evangelical. No doubt thinking of the persistent rumors still flying around the Internet that say he is a closet Muslim, Obama reiterated, for about the seven millionth time this year, that he, too, is a practicing Christian. “This is a nation of believers,” he said, “and I’m one of them.”

A teenage girl asked Obama what he might do specifically for rural America. I found it odd that Obama had to be prompted to address this question, but he warmed to it immediately, ticking off a list of public investments that his administration could bring to the region: broadband lines, school financing, the development of biodiesel fuels. He talked about creating more jobs for local students, “so when they graduate from college those kids can stay here and live in Lebanon instead of having to go and work someplace else.”

Having finished that thought, Obama suddenly straightened up, as if something else important had just occurred to him. “One thing I want to make clear while we’re on this topic of rural America,” he said, looking around the gym. “There are a lot of folks who come up to me and say, ‘You know, Barack, I like your economic plan, and I’m tired of George Bush, but you know, I got my N.R.A. mailing, and I’m worried you’re gonna take my gun away.’ ” Obama likes to do this — to momentarily inhabit the mind of some composite character and act out his side of the conversation — and he was met with knowing chuckles.

“I just want to be absolutely clear, O.K.? I just don’t want any misunderstanding when you all go home and you talk with your buddies, and they say, ‘Oh, he wants to take my gun away.’ You heard it here, and I’m on television, so everybody knows. I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.

“So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, don’t use that one!” Obama said, eliciting laughter and cheers from the crowd. “It just ain’t true!”

This truly captures Obama’s afternoon stop at that gym, and how the “validators” worked the red-state crowd.  After you attend enough of these events, it’s challenging to figure out what’s distinct about them and then convey that in a meaningful way. I remember trying to quickly capture Lebanon in a piece that day, (Obama Tours ‘God’s Country,’ Va.), but Bai does it so much better and deeper.  But I’m not flagging this just to give a writer props.

If you were following the news during the Lebanon event, you would not know a thing about all the details reported above. But you would have read headlines like this about Obama’s appearance:

JOHN MCCAIN, SARAH PALIN ARE LIKE LIPSTICK ON PIG – OBAMA

It was not a one-day story, of course. Over the following week, there were 723 news reports quoting Obama’s cliched reference to “lipstick on a pig,” (according to a Westlaw news search).

Now those articles seem even more out of touch, knowing the nation was weeks away from a grave financial crisis.  Given the dispopriotionate attention on Joe the Plumber, however, it doesn’t seem like many campaign reporters have learned the lesson.