With Mitt Romney, ever silvery lining comes with its own cloud. Tuesday night, he won primaries in Michigan and Arizona, re-establishing his position as the frontrunner for the presidential nomination. But he still finishes the week with his presidential prospects weaker than he started it – and with his party unconvinced by the merits of his candidacy.

At the auction of foreclosed homes at Queens supreme court in New York, the official carefully explained the process for one person to make an offer on another person's misery. As the bidding was about to begin on what was once the home of Valencia Williams, around 20 people stood up and started to sing: "Mr Auctioneer / And all the people here / We're asking you to call off the sale right now / We're going to survive but we don't know how."

In the small hours of 11 July 1958, three policemen entered the home of Mildred and Richard Loving, in Central Point, Virginia and found them in bed. When Richard pointed to his marriage certificate indicating that Mildred was his wife, they arrested them. Richard was white; Mildred was black and Cherokee. They were breaking the law, as laid down in Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, which banned mixed-race marriage.

Barack Obama has often been lucky with his enemies. During his senatorial primary campaign in Illinois in 2004 the campaign of his most-feared opponent imploded spectacularly just a few weeks before polling day. Unsealed divorce papers revealed that Blair Hull's former wife had detailed several allegations of verbal and physical abuse. His ex asked for a restraining order because Hull had threatened to kill her. In a field of eight, Obama won 53% of the vote.

No wonder the Republicans have lost their way. For a party that considers itself socially conservative with a base that takes the bible literally its moral compass is seriously askew.

In 1997 black America gained a new hero when Tiger Woods putted himself into history at the US Masters. Within a few weeks, it had lost him in an unlikely fashion—to a bespoke racial identity articulated on Oprah’s couch.

In the summer before the 2004 US election I was in Maine, which at the time was considered a swing state. There I met Cynthia Huntington, who adopted me as a friend and invited me out for a picnic. We were talking politics on the banks of Lake Tunk when she explained a personal and economic dilemma that, for her at least, held electoral consequences. She was 60 and had a hernia but had no health insurance and no means to pay for an operation.

Not long after I arrived in the US, in 2003, some white Americans would challenge me over my opposition to the Iraq war, referring to it as a form of appeasement. "If it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking German," they'd say. Given that my ancestors were taken to Barbados as slaves, and then immigrated to Britain as colonial subjects, this seemed a peculiar charge.