Just a few weeks ago, Barack Obama’s re-election bid was beginning to look like an easy downhill jog. The daring raid that the president ordered delivered Osama bin Laden to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Economic prospects looked brighter. Perhaps most helpfully, the Republican party seemed to be indulging in some kind of collective death-wish, putting Donald Trump first in the polls and Representative Paul Ryan’s budget cutting at the top of its legislative agenda. The GOP’s early presidential skirmishing took place in a land of conservative make-believe, where tax cuts grow on trees and the president can be described as any sort of alien – foreign-born, Muslim, collectivist – that one chooses.

Mr Obama’s spring peak came at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in late April, when he jovially deflated Mr Trump, while the navy Seals were en route to Abbottabad. But since then, the political weather has turned less favourable. Unemployment rose to a treacherous 9.1 per cent, while the Dow fell nearly 1,000 points from its peak. The odds of a serious economic aftershock to the Great Recession have risen. Most alarmingly from a Democratic perspective, the Republican party appears gradually to be going sane.

The GOP presidential field, while hardly dominated by political giants, appears far less outlandish than one might have predicted. At the first Republican debate in New Hampshire on Monday, the seven candidates competed not for evangelical or libertarian favour but for the status of someone to compete with Mr Obama for swing voters.