If you sit long enough in the company of jolly Republicans, you will hear that the president’s problem is that he’s a ‘pansy-ass’, that he wouldn’t come to Israel’s aid against Iran because he’s ‘too Muslim himself’, that he’s trying to hide his family from the country because he’s ‘not a real American’, that it would be easy for him to prove everything with some ‘microfiche’ from the hospital where he was born, that the best thing about America is our defence, and that Obamacare is ‘full of terrible, terrible things’ called ‘entitlements’. I have heard this stuff in Tampa, not, it should be said, from delegates or officials, but from nice people who believe things if they hear them repeated enough times. I’ve also heard that the best years ever were the ones between 1983 and 1987, that no one ever did as much for American women as the dynamic duo of Ronald Reagan and the personal computer, that the parties at the RNC have never been as good as they were for Goldwater in San Francisco in 1964, that New York is a bad place to live because of rapists, and that the hottest guys at the convention are the officers of the Secret Service. I saw a woman swoon as she said the words ‘tax cut’.