The Republican challenger brought with him onto the stage in a frosty fairgrounds outside this south-west Ohio town not just his wife Ann, his running mate Paul Ryan and his wife Janna, but a veritable conservative hall of fame.
There was Romney's predecessor as presidential candidate, John McCain, and his wife Cindy; a cornucopia of US senators and governors including Rob Portman of Ohio, Marco Rubio of Florida, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana; and the two Ricks who had given Romney such a hard time in the Republican primaries: Rick Perry and Rick Santorum, though they were pointedly not invited to speak.
And still they kept on coming, standing frozen in a long line on the stage to display their unquestioning loyalty to their anointed leader. Rudy Giuliani, still adored after all these years as the "zero tolerance" saviour of New York, denounced Barack Obama as "the worst president for our economy in our lifetime".
Then John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, appeared. His eyes were watering from the bitterly cold wind, unless he was crying which is eminently possible.
Boehner was given a particularly lusty cheer by the crowd, as West Chester is his home town and south-west Ohio his childhood manor. "Four years ago Barack Obama talked about hope and change and post-partisan politics," this most partisan of congressional leaders said. "But four years later we have got less jobs and less freedom."
If this mega rally, which the organisers inexplicably billed as a "Romney-Ryan Real Recovery Road Rally", was designed to show the world that the Republican nominee finally has the back of his own party, it was left terribly late in the day. With less than three days left of campaigning, we are well beyond the eleventh hour.
But the crowd lapped it up, chanting "Four more days" as a taunting riposte to the Democrats' "four more years", and waving placards that said: "Moms for Mitt", "We are Romulans" and "Redlegs for Romney".
It remains the case though, despite the high-powered turn-out for Romney, that conservative voters are more energised this year by hatred of Obama than they are by any love of their own candidate. When asked what had inspired them to come out on this frigid night, individuals in the almost exclusively white crowd invariably talked about their fears about the future of their country under its current leadership.
"Four more years of Obama and the mood of the country will deteriorate; we'll slide into a non-work ethic," said heavy-equipment operator Mike Roberts.
"We are heading towards European socialism, like Greece and Spain," said Ed Lewis. "We will be owned by somebody else, we'll never see the prosperity our parents saw," said his wife Jo.
Those are the anxieties, the paranoias, that the Republican high command, shivering on stage, hope will drive sufficient Ohioans to the polling stations on Tuesday to paint this state, and thus the presidency, red. When Romney finally joined them and took the microphone, the 18th speaker of the night, he picked up the theme.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
image: © Gage Skidmore
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