His next scapegoat was the news media, because "good news doesn't get the same kind of ratings as bad news any more," although he didn't tell his audience when it ever did or, apart from North Korea, where it ever does. The dog-whistle was then blown long and hard when he told the assembled young women that "you're going to have to grapple with some unique challenges, like whether you'll be able to earn equal pay for equal work . . . whether you'll be able to fully control decisions about your own health." As sexual discrimination in pay has been illegal here since 1963, it hasn't been "a unique challenge" for nearly half a century. But the reference to women's health was intended to raise the bogey of the Republicans reversing the pro-abortion Roe v Wade decision — which is simply not going to happen in any foreseeable future — and also the genuine worry that Obamacare will be overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Almost all the women in his deeply privileged audience will be able to afford health insurance once they graduate, assuming they get jobs in the Obama economy, and so would in fact have more control over their own health if the insurance industry does not fall into the hands of the state under the Obama proposals, but the whole point about dog-whistle politics is that it doesn't need to go into details.

He mentioned foreign oil, "the carbon pollution that's threatening our planet", "rules that stop big banks from making bad bets with other people's money", and lots about his daughters Malia and Sasha. "People ask me sometimes, who inspires you, Mr President? Those quiet heroes all across the country — some of your parents and grandparents who are sitting here . . . I'm only here because of them." It is corny lines like that which Obama hopes will see him through to a second term, and so schmaltzy has political discourse in this country become that he might well be right. The Oprah Winfrey-isation of life here extends far beyond the entertainment industry, and is such that it really may no longer be "the economy, stupid" that determines the outcome of this election. If being made to feel "empowered" and warm inside leads to winning votes — and every poll on the subject suggests that it does — then Republicans tolling the tocsin and warning about national bankruptcy, healthcare mayhem and loss of global hegemony may well be counter-productive.

It wasn't until his peroration that Obama got on to "how we achieved gay rights", claiming "That's how we made this Union more perfect." His recent backing for gay marriage is not without its dangers — not least among black evangelicals, whose reading of scripture can be as literal as any white Southern fundamentalist — but the polling has so far been roughly 54 to 46 per cent in his favour. The news, which broke on the same day as the President's announcement, that Romney had bullied an effeminate child at school 40 years earlier — to the extent that he was held down and had his hair cut off by Romney and his friends —could therefore not have come at a worse moment. The timing of the revelation was most probably orchestrated by David Axelrod's utterly ruthless White House campaign, for any Administration that would leak the details of the second al-Qaeda underwear bomb plot for good publicity is clearly capable of synchronising and contrasting the President's embrace of gay marriage with Romney's alleged aggression towards an individual gay boy.

One area where Romney has managed to minimise his negatives — at least so far — is over his Mormonism. Two days before the graduates of Barnard gave Obama 36 shrieking ovations, Romney was at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, which claims to "train champions for Christ". Founded by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, the ultra-conservative university was until recently a local headquarters for the anyone-but-Romney campaigns that saw so many alternatives rise and fall as the Republicans chose their candidate. Even the choice of having a Mormon preaching there was criticised by some in the faculty.