By: Mike Hosking | Thursday, September 20, 2012 7:37 AM

In politics, impression is everything. Mitt Romney is probably technically right.

Probably technically right that the Palestinian problem can’t be solved – after all, it’s not like every president hasn’t had a decent go. And he’s almost certainly right that the election will be decided by a relative handful of undecideds and independents and it’s his job to convince them to swing his way. But he’s right in the same way John Banks and John Key are right and no charges have been laid in the mayoral finding row. Being technically right doesn’t make it look good and doesn’t mean it doesn’t smell.

The Romney problem is coming home to roost. He never looked the goods in the first place. He looked the best of the Republican goods, only just, but he never looked good enough to be a president. The fact he could barely distance himself from people like Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Perry was our first clue. Not one of them looked star material and given that, any real contender should have been able to see them off early.

That’s before you got to his extraordinary ability to say things that don’t sit well with regular people. Whether it be in Britain insulting the hosts of the Olympic Games, in Israel infuriating the Palestinians, or not being able to recognise that having a Swiss bank account is not normal. The trouble with all this is two-fold. You give the other side material they could only dream of and all the material you wanted to talk about doesn’t get to see the light of day - everyone’s so focused on the stuff you didn’t mean to say or did mean to say but didn’t know it was being recorded or the stuff you did mean to say but you just didn’t put it all that well.

The story of most campaigns can be told in momentum. You hold your conference, you fire people up with the message, you hit the campaign trail, and you collect the supporters along the way, enough of them to sweep you into the White House. None of that has happened for Romney. The conference didn’t fire and he’s done little if anything to help since. When things unfold the way they have, you get your next problem – infighting, of which there seems to be plenty.

With three months to go, I called an Obama win. With just seven weeks, it looks more like a cake walk!

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