And so, to battle for Mitt and Barry

Convention season is over. All around me in the airport hangar-sized basement of the Charlotte Conference Centre, forklift trucks are heaving and beeping with giant boxes.

The traffic barriers have gone. The police, the delegates, the anti-abortion demonstrators with their grisly placards, the Obama glove puppet salesmen with their half sold stock have all disappeared. What is left are words from a few speeches ringing in the ears of a weary nation.

After their convention the Republicans soldier on with grim determination, firm in their conviction that victory should be theirs – in theory. Wobbly in their belief that Mitt amounts to a winning ticket.

The Democrats are in an exuberant state of denial. They can’t fathom losing with a guy like Obama. They renewed their vows with him at this gathering. They will flock home and knock on doors and work the phones in the next 60 days until their fingers bleed.

But even some of the most enthusiastic delegates admitted to me last night that this was not one of Obama’s best speeches. The bar had been set high, very high, the night before by that verbal magician Bill Clinton.

The best line of the night surely belonged to the usually verbose John Kerry who riffed on the theme of the convention season when he said: “I tell you who IS worse off than he was four years ago. Osama bin laden.” If only he had been that pithy when he tried and failed to defeat W in 04.

In fact if you didn’t know it already, this convention reminded you that Osama is indeed dead. Big time.

Obama failed to reach beyond his base to inspire the ditherers contemplating divorce. If there was any poetry, it was mangled by the prose of the last four years. The two words that kept cropping up were not hope and change but middle class.

The speech sounded at times like a worthy state of the union address. But so what. This election has never been about words. It is about cold hard numbers.

There was a fresh batch on Friday morning. New jobs added in August: 95 000. This is very lacklustre. It needs to be 125 000 a month just to keep up with population growth. If there is a recovery, the American people certainly aren’t feeling it.

So the trench war of the campaign continues. The next 60 days will see both candidates lavish a obscene amounts of money and FaceTime on a small slither of the population in a handful of battleground states like Virginia, Ohio or Florida.

And for all their excitement and coverage both conventions will have barely moved the opinion poll dial. Stasis for a total cost of 80 million dollars, about the same as an entire British general election campaign. A bargain it ain’t.

But at least we know that Mitt and Barry are great guys and fabulous dads. Take it from their wives.

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