Us politics

Put it this way: Mitt Romney's route to the White House is perilously thin. He has little margin for error. Recent polls suggest Barack Obama has benefited from the Democratic convention much more than Romney was helped by the Republican party's gathering in Florida. As always, it is worth recalling that polling advantages in late August or even early to mid September are rarely dispositive. Of course Romney can still win but that's hardly the same as thinking he's likely to. The map at the top of this post - compiled at 270 To Win - shows how Romney could squeak an electoral college tie and send the election to the House of Representatives. That result is necessarily improbable but it's just one illustration of how narrow Romney's path to victory really is.

Republicans like to say that Barack Obama’s 2008 slogan 'Hope' has been replaced by 'Fear'. And they are right. If you listen to Obama and his campaign paladins, you might think that Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee is itching to take away your Medicare and break the sacred American promise of Social Security. Hell, a Romney presidency means you are more likely to get cancer. Or if you are a woman, you’ll probably die due to complications from an illegal back-street abortion. Everything will be lame again, like the 1950s. Vote Obama, or else. At the Democratic convention this week, President Obama will tell his supporters that he still believes that, together, he can change America.

Traditionally - that is, for the last 50 or so years - Labor Day is considered the "official" start of the Presidential campaign. Since Labor Day is today t's OK to pay attention now. The Democrats meet in Charlotte, North Carolina for their convention this week of which, I suppose, more later. I wrote a column on Romneypalooza in Tampa for the Scotsman. Here's the guts of it: No-one will ever be inspired by Romney, but the convention did its best to present him as a real-life, honest-to-goodness actual human being. This unpromising project was more successful than seemed plausible before the convention began. The week’s most moving moment came when two of Romney’s fellow Mormons recalled how Romney had visited and comforted and inspired their sick children.

Way back in my debating days at Trinity College, Dublin we knew you could guarantee large crowds and impressively  - that is, pleasingly - bad-tempered debates twice a year. These were the annual debates on Northern Ireland and abortion. And they really were annual fixtures during which, for years on end, the same arguments were deployed with the same passion and no-one's views were ever changed by anything they heard. In those days it was usually pretty clear who the bad guys were too. In the case of abortion it was anyone speaking as a representative of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child or, more generally, anyone whose views seemed dictated by the Roman Catholic Church. These were the people standing in the way of Ireland's journey to modernity.