Mitt Romney is running the worst presidential campaign since George McGovern – and that's going back a bit. Not a week goes by without the Republican candidate putting his foot in it. This week he refused to apologise for describing, to a closed audience of fundraisers, 47% of the American population as government-dependent victims. That was not all. In the same speech he wrote off the two-state solution in the Middle East, a policy to which every US government has been committed for three decades. Not bad for one night's work.

Last week's gaffe was his attempt to score a cheap news cycle hit by attacking a statement issued by the US embassy in Cairo, just before it became known that the ambassador in Libya had been killed. An attack on a US ambassador is an attack on all Americans, not a concept with which Mr Romney is familiar. He is, by his own account, only interested in the ones who are going to vote for him. Before Libya, there was Clint Eastwood's strange monologue with an empty chair.