More showbusiness than politics, Republicans anoint Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney headed off to talk to survivors of Hurricane Isaac in Louisiana yesterday, leaving a furious debate swirling in his wake over the effectiveness of the most important speech of his life.

Mr Romney tore into president Barack Obama at the Republican national convention in Florida as he accepted his party’s official nomination to stand against the incumbent in November’s general election.

While the former governor of Massachusetts landed several blows over Mr Obama’s handling of the economy, and presented himself as personable and a safe pair of hands to lead the country forward, opinion was divided whether his speech commanded enough authority or presidential grandeur.

“Mitt Romney is a good man and this speech reflected his goodness, but it did not confidently communicate a specific vision for greatness as president,” said Newsweek’s John Avlon.

Kurt Shillinger of the Christian Science Monitor, meanwhile, described Mr Romney’s speech as: “a tepid mix of boilerplate and biography, by turns heart-warming and quizzical, vague on policy, economical with the truth, and without a distinctly memorable and soaring line.”

One theme of Mr Romney’s speech was unemployment and his plan to create 12 million jobs. Mr Obama, he said, had let down the US population by allowing unemployment to soar.

“I wish Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed. But his promises gave way to disappointments and division,” he said. “Hope and change had a powerful appeal. But tonight I’d ask a simple question: if you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s president Obama? You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.

“The president has disappointed America because he hasn’t led America in the right direction.”

There was little policy detail in the rest of Mr Romney’s speech, however, and he chose to avoid or skim over crucial issues such as his healthcare proposals, abortion, immigration and recent criticism of his controversial record as head of the financial investment group Bain Capital.

Instead, he praised his newly-announced running mate Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman, then ran through a list of Mr Obama’s failings and chose to talk at length about his own family in an attempt to present himself as a warm and welcoming candidate for the White House.

“Romney hit few ideological hot buttons, and he broke little new ground,” said the Washington Post’s EJ Dionne, who still thought that Mr Romney mostly accomplished what he needed to do, scoring points with undecided voters or those who backed Mr Obama in 2008 and have since become disillusioned.

“Romney’s was not a great speech, but it did at least familiarise its hearers with aspects of his personal journey of which they were unaware,” he said.

“[But] the burden of having to telling his personal story fell heavily on this speech: it took up space and time and left the speech very thin on ideas and policy.”

The first opinion polls nationally indicate that US voters were largely unmoved. A Rasmussen tracking poll reported by the website Real Clear Politics yesterday showed Mr Romney leading Mr Obama 45 per cent to 44 in the national vote, his first lead for a week but still keeping the race as a virtual tie, as it has been for months.