THE Republican primaries are meant to last six months, allowing all 50 states to have their say in the nomination of a candidate to take on Barack Obama in November. Amazingly, they may be all over only days after they started.

On January 10th, a week after his victory in conservative Iowa, Mitt Romney trounced his six opponents in liberal New Hampshire, winning nearly twice the share of his nearest rival (see article). The polls predict a victory for him in South Carolina on January 21st, and another in Florida on the 31st. Even if the race staggers on beyond that, he has raised as much money and built a bigger organisation than the rest of the Republican field combined. Barring an upset, Mr Romney is likely to win the nomination. The polls suggest that, should he do so, he has a real chance of ousting a president who has squandered much of his standing with the political centre.

But he has a lot of work to do. At the moment many Americans find him a bit of an enigma: a flip-flopper on some big issues, wooden in public, and a committed member of one of the world's odder religions. None of that is entirely unfair, but it is exaggerated and incomplete (see article). At his best, Mr Romney should be able to offer America a competent centre-right alternative to Mr Obama (and drag the latter back towards the ignored middle). But he must do a better job than he so far has of capitalising on his advantages and mitigating his weaknesses.

Paint it grey

Start with the advantages. The most important fact about Mr Romney is that he is a non-ideological man who did something that America needs a lot more of. In 2002 he was elected to govern Massachusetts, normally a Democratic stronghold. He passed a version of health-care reform that is at once his proudest achievement and his biggest liability. Back then a system based on obliging everyone to buy private health insurance was a conservative idea, and Mr Romney did a good job of working with a hostile legislature to get it passed. (Today, his party viscerally opposes Mr Obama's health reforms, which are closely modelled on Mr Romney's; such are the twists of politics.) He also turned round Massachusetts's finances, just as he had earlier righted the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Mr Romney needs to make these successes count for more than they have so far. Once the primaries are over, and America's independents rather than the Republican Party faithful become the electorate to win over, he may be able to.

Second, Mr Romney has something that the president and his Republican rivals sorely lack: business experience. For 25 years he made himself and the management consultancies BCG and Bain a lot of money by making companies more efficient which, yes, sometimes means firing people, but also drives economic growth (see article). So far, Mr Romney has done a poor job of defending himself against attacks which are really aimed at the creative destruction which is the essence of capitalism itself. He says he created a net 100,000 jobs during his time at Bain. That figure is impossible to prove, but he could do more to argue that the benefits outweigh the costs. His task has not been helped by disgraceful attacks from fellow-Republicans on corporate restructuring.

Third, Mr Romney seems sure-footed. It is hard to think of a single misstep in this campaign. He may be wooden, but no scandal has ever attached to him. His family life is impeccably monogamous and progenitive. Those who have worked closely with him tend to admire him. On both the economic and the foreign-policy sides, he has already put together impressive and above all sensibly moderate teams.

The debit side of the ledger

A useful list, to be sure: but can it outweigh the negatives? Mr Romney's pragmatism has an inconvenient flip side: no one is quite sure where he stands. The Republican base does not think he is reliable on such things as gay rights and abortion. That will not matter so much to independents (who will probably also accept that any Republican has to say a few mad things to win a nomination). But people have to trust a president on the main issues, and, despite publishing a long economic manifesto, Mr Romney remains vague over how a lot of it is to be accomplished.

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It is not at all clear how he would reform America's ruinously expensive health-care and pensions systems. His views on what he wants to do about America's 12m illegal immigrants are also unsettlingly gnomic. And where he has been clear, he has sometimes been wrong: his insistence that, on day one of his presidency, he will brand China as a currency manipulator represents dangerous pandering to populists. His pledge to cut federal spending to no more than 20% of GDP, a sop to his party's fiscal extremists, would also be dangerous if applied as quickly as he implies.

Mr Romney will have other problems in wooing the electorate. He would be the richest candidate ever to win a big-party nomination and he reeks of privilege. His father was a governor as well, and he himself studied law at Harvard. On the other hand, Mr Obama is a millionaire several times over, can give a fair impression of having come from the planet Vulcan, and also studied law at Harvard. Mr Romney's lack of charisma is a problem; but perhaps America wants fewer soaring speeches and more pragmatic restructuring plans.

Mr Romney's last difficulty is one that should not be a problem at all. He is a Mormon and, despite Mormons' protestations to the contrary, a third of Americans do not consider them to be Christians. There is not much Mr Romney can do about this. He could explain the Mormons' extraordinary missionary work, but he can hardly risk saying that it is not really any more incredible that God communicated His plans to man in upstate New York in 1820 than He did in Palestine in 0AD. We recall, however, that America was for decades “not ready” for a Catholic president, or for a black one. Eventually, Americans thought better of those attitudes. Prejudice would be a silly reason for the Republicans to reject a man who offers their best chance of beating Mr Obama.