The British party conference season has once again drawn to a close, and from it, there is a lesson that can be drawn for the upcoming general election.Meanwhile, the US presidential election is heating up, and Republican Mitt Romney’s rebound after last week’s debate shows how the same lesson occupying the centre ground in politics — can change a campaign’s direction.In Britain, Labour leader Ed Miliband is thought to have raised his personal popularity with a speech in which he emphasised his supposed ordinariness, in comparison to Prime Minister David Cameron, who is indisputably a child of privilege.Mr Miliband also expropriated a long held Conservative slogan One Britain (sound familiar?) in order to broaden his party’s appeal.Mr Cameron responded by acknowledging his privileged upbringing but by restating his desire not to abolish privilege, but to make it available to all.This is a theme that the One Bermuda Alliance might look at carefully. It continues to be hampered with the propaganda that it is a creature of the white establishment, or what’s left of it, and it cannot deny that some of its leaders are indeed the beneficiaries of advantages that were not available to all, and to some degree, still are not.But if those opportunities can be broadened — if bright children who have had excellent public educations can attend Oxford or Harvard regardless of their means — then everyone benefits. This is levelling up, rather than levelling down.For the Progressive Labour Party, the idea of appealing to the whole community seems to be anathema, at least based on its current advertising approach.But aiming for 51 percent of the vote and assuming that turning out the party’s base will be enough to get there may not be a winning strategy.That’s what Governor Romney seemed to finally figure out in last week’s debate.After veering further and further to the right to secure the Republican nomination and to appeal to a sceptical Republican base, he seemed to remember that he had once been a moderate Republican Governor in a famously Democratic state Massachusetts where he was quite successful.Not surprisingly, his movement back to the middle appealed to undecided voters and his poll ratings shot up.By contrast, a subdued President Obama attempted to target Governor Romney in a negative way just as the Democrats’ advertising had been doing (and, yes, the Republican advertising has been highly negative as well).In a face to face debate, this strategy failed.The US presidential race is far from over. There are two more debates and plenty of time for either candidate to pull ahead.But the lesson should be clear: appealing to the middle ground in politics is still the best winning strategy in a general election.That’s why Mitt Romney has remembered he’s a moderate, why the Obama campaign will presumably remember that it was a message of hope, not sniping at the opposition, that brought victory in 2008, and why Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband are emphasising the need for equality of opportunity and unity in Britain.Both the PLP and the OBA can learn from this.