Obama’s nightmare

The 2012 US presidential election will long be remembered for the encounters between a sleepwalker and a ghost intent on breaking into the White House. Even now, after one vice-presidential debate and two presidential debates, it is by no means clear which will win.

Millions of astonished Americans watched the first televised encounter, which took place in Denver, Colorado on 4 October. Democratic supporters were apoplectic: their supercool and eloquent President, Barack Obama, was transformed into an unresisting somnambulist by a mysterious intruder. The intruder was identified as Willard Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger. But it was hard to be sure, because he assumed so many moderate shapes and positions which the real Romney on the campaign trail had denounced as heresy.

On that first encounter in Denver, the president could not get a grip on the shimmering ectoplasm who was now Moderate Mitt. In the normal course of events, the oscillations of Romney would have invoked derision and scorn from the commentariat, which likes nothing better than mocking inconsistency and gaffe. To win the party’s nomination Romney had been forced to abandon the moderate, middle-of-the-road policies he’d espoused as the Governor of Massachusetts. He would not otherwise have survived the long, gruelling primary season dominated by Tea Party insurgents from the right.

The Tea Partiers demand that candidates should exhibit none of the corrupting traits of liberalism, like believing Charles Darwin was on to something, or that global warming might not be a hoax. To do really well in the ridiculous primaries — oh, bring back the smoke-filled rooms when the party bosses did the choosing! — a candidate had also to express a suspicion that Barack Obama was not really an American-born citizen.

Mitt could not resist making a cheap jibe that his own birth certificate was in order, but he’d begun to strike a more moderate note after the Republican convention, leaving the contempt for the President to be executed by Clint Eastwood talking profanities to an empty chair.