Daily dispatches from Denver

AMERICANS have a remarkable talent for creating transparently pointless political rituals. The most pointless of all is the “spin room”. The first thing that journalism’s finest do after every debate is rush off, notebooks in hand, to a special room where the candidate’s surrogates brief them about how well their man (or woman) did. Dennis Kucinich is building up unstoppable momentum! Tom Tancredo has the Republican nomination in the bag! The spinmeisters manage to impart all this nonsense not just with a straight face but with a look of complete sincerity.

The big question hanging over the next two weeks is whether the conventions are the most transparently pointless rituals of all. It has been decades since anything was actually decided at a convention. They have degenerated into little more than prolonged infomercials designed for prime-time television. ...