There are two core aspects to fighting wars and winning campaigns: tactics and strategy. Tactics allow you to seize opportunities or maximise your underlying strengths. But strategy matters more for the long haul; without it, you can be brilliantly successful from day to day and yet lose your direction and focus as time goes by.

So far, in the short time that we have had a real general election campaign in the United States, one team has shown some brilliant and daring, if occasionally crude, tactical skills. The other has shown a willingness to forgo sudden decisions or short-term strikes in favour of long-term goals. John McCain has been the tactician and Barack Obama the strategist. McCain has been the risk-taker, Obama the cool conservative.

Last week revealed this contrast again. Obama’s strategic skills have been obvious for quite a while. He is perfectly prepared to hang back in a campaign, to allow attacks to pummel him and to lose news cycles or primaries to a media-centric opponent. Last autumn he refused to shift his message, even as Hillary Clinton’s massive double-digit lead did not budge for months. He focused on a plan based on delegates and caucuses, conceding that the Clintons controlled much of the rest. He took several blows – the Wright flap, the Texas and Ohio primaries, “bitter-gate” – but stuck to his game plan, which had always predicted a very narrow delegate win. And he won, slowly, carefully but unmistakably.

Over the past six weeks, against a Republican opponent this time, the pattern has repeated itself. In my view, Obama lost most of the weeks during July and August after his Berlin speech and before his convention. He allowed McCain to portray him as an inexperienced, celebrity narcissist, constructing a cult of personality on a welter of insubstantial rhetoric. The attacks worked, as they often do. They reached fever pitch last week as rumours of a “Greek temple” hosting the Obama godhead at Denver’s Invesco stadium were leaked to the press.

However, when you take the long view, you see cunning and method in Obama’s restraint and discipline. His biggest problem after the primaries was the Clinton hangover. That dynasty dominated the party he was leading and demanded respect and deference, but not too much deference, in case they seemed to overwhelm him.

Handling that was an extremely tricky task – but the convention showed how attuned Obama’s emotional intelligence is. He gave the Clintons all they could have ever wanted. In the face of deep bitterness under the surface, especially among older female voters, Obama gave Hillary a night to shine and preen and gave Bill a podium to remind the world how good he still is.

When Hillary personally suspended the roll call and called for Obama’s nomination to be approved by acclamation, she threw the weight of the party behind her rival. When Bill personally vouched for Obama’s readiness for office that night, the deal was sealed. Somehow, Obama had brought the Clintons fully on board even while passing over Hillary for the vice-presidency. He made it look much easier than it might have been. Anyone who can handle the Clintons that deftly is a very smooth operator.

Then the best speech of the week: Michelle Obama’s. Her job was to remind people that Obama is actually from a modest background, as she is. Her task was to dispel the aura of otherness hovering like a cloud of alienation over his candidacy. It was a masterful speech, conversational, patriotic, uplifting – the opposite of the angry woman the far right had tried to demonise.

Joe Biden’s speech – not the attack that was expected – was also oddly effective. Biden oozed classic Democratic culture: Irish-Catholic ethnics in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan. He was the white uncle of the promising young black guy, reassuring the punters in the pub that the kid was all right. And he is a foreign policy heavyweight, a pick which suggested that Obama was more concerned with getting the best advice in office than the most headline-grabbing vice-presidential pick for the campaign.

Then the finale: Obama’s oration to 84,000 people in a football stadium. And again: a strategic decision. After allowing the McCain campaign to portray him as an airy rhetorician, an aloof and insubstantial political version of Britney Spears, Obama gave a detailed, economically focused, traditional Democratic tub-thumper, with aggression and steel and great seriousness. Yes, it was rhetoric of a high order. But it was concrete, it appealed to middle-class Americans on liberal, Democratic grounds and showed a feistiness and aggression that some had not known was part of him. No, he is not Jimmy Carter or Adlai Stevenson. He’s from Chicago. It showed.

From day to day the convention went up and down. It had poor moments and strong ones. But when it was over and you took its full measure, you realised how shrewd it was. The Clintons? Not just defused but energised. Race? Embraced but also transcended. Experience? Biden. Celebrity? Michelle’s life story. Every box was checked. Even the danger of the Invesco stadium speech was deflated by the event itself. It did not look like a Greek temple. And the images of the people in the stands, far from making Obama look like a rock star, drew visual attention to the unconventionally apolitical aspect of Obama’s following. The people in that crowd were not just the party die-hards. They made the process seem less exclusive.

Throughout all this, the McCain campaign remained hyperactive, almost succumbing at times to attention deficit disorder. They kept making somewhat crude appeals to the Clinton camp; they kept threatening to announce the vice-presidential pick before Obama’s speech; they went overboard on the Greek temple foofaraw. And then they unveiled their counterstroke: Sarah Palin as vice-president, a woman whose educational experience is limited to a journalism degree at the University of Idaho, who has no experience or even interest in foreign policy, and who has less than two years of experience as the 44-year-old governor of Alaska, a state with a mere 700,000 residents.

It was a brilliant, attention-grabbing move. It dominated the news cycle in the wake of Obama’s well received speech on Thursday night; it appealed to women and to the Hillary voters; it rallied the pro-life base, as Palin is firmly against abortion rights and has just given birth to a Down’s syndrome child; it offered a fresh face to rail against corruption in Washington; it helped McCain’s maverick image; and it enabled McCain to present himself as the candidate of change, rather than following the Clinton strategy against Obama of representing experience.

It was another tactic – guerrilla-style, clever, nimble, deft. But, one senses, also a little desperate, a little too risky, a little unserious. America is at war with lethal enemies, its economy is teetering, its people are unsettled. And McCain gave us a 44-year-old former beauty queen as the person who could be asked to take over the White House in an emergency if anything happened to the oldest first-term president in American history. Tactically: daring. Strategically: potentially disastrous.

Game on. And, advantage: Obama.

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