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.