To the convention; to podium; to medal; to win –

Governor Romney hit London recently on the first leg of his would-be-presidential world tour just as the UK’s Olympic temperature was reaching its fever pitch. Mitt pitched himself into immediate controversy by making some disparaging comments about UK’s preparedness for the Games – comparing our efforts unfavourably to his own in Utah –  and found himself being given a good duffing over by our less than deferential tabloid press. The governor left London looking a little shaken and leaving his hosts less than stirred by his brief presence.

The disaster might be said to be a leitmotif for the entire Romney campaign thus far. However, miffed by Mitt and unimpressed though British voters might have been by Romney’s faux pas over the Olympics – at the end of the day these are voters the former Massachusetts Governor can afford to offend.

On the other side of the Atlantic In a little over two weeks the last great annual ritual of the US summer will be underway in New York City. The city hosts what is the last of the annual cycle of Grand Slam tennis tournaments. This tournament historically overlaps with the Labour Day holiday –  which itself marks the formal end of summer and the formal opening of the US elections.  The hard courts of the Arthur Ashe Stadium in the Billy Jean King US Tennis Centre speak to an age not so long ago when the US dominated tennis as they dominated so much else in the world. But times change and as that final is no longer played on the grass courts of Forest Hills but on the harder surfaces of Flushing Meadow so the hard political game is no longer dominated in quite the same way by the United States. Indeed if president Obama loses in November it may well be seen that events in Europe – most specifically in the parts of Europe using the single currency or Euro – that will have played a decisive part in his downfall.

The hard courts of Flushing Meadow are among Andy Murray’s favourite surfaces. Murray has been a finalist here before – though I think the last British player to win the championship was Virginia Wade in 1968. She defeated Billy Jean King 6-4;6-2 in the final –  having defeated her compatriot Anne Jones in the semi final. Many think Wade played in that 1968 final – the first of the open era –  some of the finest tennis ever seen in the women’s game.  Anne Jones went on to win Wimbledon in 1969 and Virginia Wade famously in Silver Jubilee year 1977.

Since then no British player of either sex has lifted a grand slam trophy. Though the men’s game has produced three finalists – John Lloyd; Greg Rusedski and Murray, now four times a finalist no British player has won a grand slam. The British players no matter how talented just never just never seemed to be quite winners.

Last Sunday that all changed.  Andy Murray has won his Olympic gold medal on Centre Court revenging his defeat by Roger Federer in Wimbledon finals a month earlier. The big question is will be is this to be a precursor to Murray finally winning a Grand Slam. So for British tennis fans this August holds out more promise or hope than usual.

At the same time Murray will start his quest to win the crown at Flushing Meadow the two principal candidates’ quest for the crown of the Presidency begins in earnest. We are now only two weeks from the party conventions in Tampa (GOP) and Charlotte (Democrat). And the end of the party conventions fires the starting-gun for the final stage of the US election campaign.

Rand Paul, Rick Santorum will be speaking from the platform at the Republican National Convention. Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, who is in a close battle for the Massachusetts Senate seat held formerly by Edward Kennedy, will be amongst those speaking at the Democrats’ convention a few days later. Jimmy Carter will tape a video address to the delegates. This will be the first Democrat convention since 1956 where none of the three Kennedy brothers plays a some part. The predictable razzmatazz of the conventions normally gives both candidates a short lived boost. Romney can also expect some boost from the media attention which comes from unveiling his choice for Vice President. After his recent PR disaster in Europe and Israel it maybe that someone with some foreign policy experience might strengthen his political CV.

GOP handlers thought it would burnish their candidate’s appeal if they put him on the world stage. They chose the quietus of August to launch Governor Romney on an unsuspecting world. The trip to Europe and to Israel was designed to show Mitt to some advantage with foreign leaders.  The trip tripped up the candidate and the campaign. Each of the stops turned on his grand tour turned into something of a PR disaster. As a consequence one of his senior staffers lost his cool with the press-pack and used a disparaging term for those covering the Romney campaign. It went viral on Twitter.

Meanwhile those in charge of President Obama’s campaign have filled the US airwaves with a constant attacks upon Governor Romney’s record as a taxpayer – or rather not paying his fair share of taxes – and his entrepreneurship at Bain. These attacks play well to Obama’s base supporters as the Romney campaign’s attacks on healthcare or Obamacare play well with  the GOP base.

At the same time the Democrat platform will for the first time include a pledge in favour of legalising gay marriage. It is highly unlikely the administration will be able to get any such legislation through Congress but this is nevertheless a significant moment in US politics since Dick Cheney and Karl rove used this is so effectively against senator Kerry in 2004. This time round it seems the focus groups are clearly telling the Democrats something else. Gay marriage in the culture wars used to play to Republican advantage…no longer so it seems.

The long gladiatorial marathon will reach its climax in the weeks after the conventions. To some extent the highlight of the campaign takes place almost a month before its formal end. The 2012 televised presidential debates will take place Oct. 3 at the University of Denver CO; Oct. 16 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY; and Oct. 22 at Lynn University in Boca Raton, FL The VP debate will be held Oct. 11 at Centre College in Danville, KY. The formats will be much as before though there will be one Town Hall style debate where voters put questions to the candidates and another ‘pod’ style questioning which will allocate a sixth of debate time to one single issue. But the evidence of history suggests that these staged debates with their emphasis on the prepared are rarely memorable and even more rarely change anything. But the folk-memory of the Kennedy-Nixon debates grips the American political imagination rather like the Lincoln-Douglas debates a century before. And as soon as the debates are over the debate begins about who won or lost. This is the world of spin doctors and the rest….

And this rest brings us neatly to those High Priests and Casandras of modern politics – the polls and the pollsters. The US is short of neither and they can be and often are deeply partisan. In addition many pollsters are now struggling with the fact that telephone polling is less than useful since calling mobile (cell) phones is illegal. These phone users are thought to be disproportionately younger and more Democrat. Thus all the pollsters are adjusting to and for this new reality but none are quite sure by how much they should adjust. This has led to an unseemly dispute about both polls and their results.

Yet if the polls are to believed the election is very close within 3% either way….yet equally if the state polling is to be believed the individual states are all tending to becoming either bluer (Democrat) or redder (Republican). Over the last month the number of ‘swing’ states has declined rather than increased. This election seems to be emphasising the two culturally distinct elements that make up the USA. The states of the Bible Belt and Old Confederacy and the Old West being more conservative, more religious and more Republican. Whilst the East and West coast states and the Rust Belt are more solidly Democrat than ever. The Rocky Mountain states like New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada have drifted into the Democrat column. The similar drift of college educated white collar workers into North Carolina and Virginia has also made these states competitive for the Democrats.

What does this mean? As we’ve laid out in earlier Letters in this series see for example campaign starts and stops this drift of populations has given President Obama a considerable advantage in the Electoral College math. My latest calculations show that he currently leads by around 332 to 206. Only once in the last year has Romney been ahead in the electoral college math – and then he never reached the magic 270 needed to elect him. At the moment polls show Romney only picking up North Carolina and Indiana. There are five states (Florida; Wisconsin; Colorado; New Hampshire and Virginia) with 65 votes where Obama’s lead in under 5%. If Romney picks up all of these he still on present math is only just over the 270 and then in Nebraska the likely split electoral college vote – Obama remains likely to take one congressional district there – means Romney could still be just short of 270.

None of this means Romney cannot win come November but it does mean he has yet to show any capacity to shift this election decisively in his favour. And in debates and in foreign trips and in press conferences thus far the Governor lacks the fluid charm of the President. But perhaps behind the welter of statistics that make Obama so vulnerable in this year – the slow economic growth; the continuing upheavals in the banks and on Wall street; the sluggish job figures – there’s is one which might explain why the President retains this edge – most voters still blame the policies of G.W. Bush for the economic mess and that is Romney’s Achilles heel. The Obama campaign ruthlessly and relentlessly highlights Romney’s association with those very same trickle-down economic policies beloved of G.W. Bush.

So the final reckoning approaches. We are now inside the last 100 days of this election cycle.  The president is certainly on the defensive but he has not yet given up his advantage. His self belief is undiminished. He seems convinced this election is less about floating voters and more about the cultural divide that is modern America. Governor Romney somehow has looked inevitable but never quite looked a winner. That is his challenge as we come to the final of this long championship. He needs to play the game of his life; he needs to find the touch he has so far lacked; he needs to come from behind to win.

Self belief makes winners in sport and in politics. Andy Murray finally found his on the centre court of Wimbledon last Sunday. I suspect he will win the US Open in a few weeks time. If he does that will change the dynamic of the men’s game in tennis for the next few years. Whether Governor Romney will find his over the next few weeks and change the political game in the US remains an open question.