The speech was a success. Romney showed modesty and good humour, and he got his points across well, with such regular references to Jesus that his audience was reminded that Mormons are Christians too. "Central to America's rise to global leadership is our Judaeo-Christian tradition," he said, while also slipping in great conservative statistics such as, "For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2 per cent." Of course he reiterated the standard Republican mantra that marriage is "a relationship between one man and one woman" (a curious choice of words, since so too is adultery).

Romney spoke of his turnaround of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics — a central part of the Romney mythos — and the Christian faith of the recently deceased Chuck Colson, imprisoned for his part in the Watergate affair.  He stayed off the economy, since it was a commencement address, and calmed the anti-Mormonism of the Christian fundamentalists in his audience.

Yet he will need many more Liberty-style successes if he is to dispel the all-too widespread feeling that he might be a heartless Bain Capital exploiter, a "vulture" capitalist and even, in the words of Axelrod's latest vicious campaign advert, a vampire. The two-minute TV ad claims that when Bain Capital, whose founder and CEO was Mitt Romney, took over GST Steel in Kansas City in 2001, it pocketed the profits, ran up debts, declared bankruptcy and fired all the 750 workers. "It was like a vampire," says former employee Jack Cobb in the ad. "They came and sucked the life out of us." Never mind that Romney had left Bain in 1999 in order to run the Winter Olympics, or that the whole US steel industry was collapsing under the weight of cheap imports at that time, or that the Bain partner who actually took the decision to close the mill is today a top Obama fundraiser. The ad proves that the White House will stop at nothing to undermine Romney's reputation as a successful businessman, knowing that therein lies the President's greatest electoral Achilles' heel.

There will be many more such attack ads, most of them likely to be in very dubious taste as well as being tendentious. One released by the Obama campaign on May 2 — the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death — suggested that Romney would have failed to order the strike, without giving any substantive reason for coming to that scurrilous and improbable conclusion. Americans are fully expecting a low-down-and-dirty fight this autumn, and for all his attempts to occupy the moral high ground in American public life, it is undoubtedly the President who is getting down lower and playing dirtier right now.