Brilliant summary of why Obama won

Ah... sore head this afternoon. Up until almost 5am, and one too many vodka martinis.

I've been a critic of BBC North America editor Justin Webb at several points during the election campaign, but he correctly identified an excellent potted summary of the four main reasons Obama won - from the surprising source of Daniel Finkelstein at The Times. Do read it - it's here.

I think this is probably the best I've ever seen Finkelstein write. Maybe, like Peter Oborne and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, he is becoming that rare and treasured thing - a right-wing commentator with a brain that he actually uses.

Good Morning America!

I'm just up and making myself a cup of "Good Morning America" - y'all want some?

Thank f*** America did the right thing. A popular vote margin of about 5% - well within the margin of error of the projections from recent opinion polls. Maybe people will believe the polls a bit more next time. What an amazing contrast with Bush's election in 2000 - whilst there will no doubt be some accusations of theft going around, those making the accusations will look pretty laughable.

Some quick thoughts on where the US goes from here:

McCain's concession speech sounds like the "nasty button" has been switched off - I guess he realised there was no point wallowing in vitriol at this point. "The failure is mine", he says - yes, but not for the reasons he thinks. He ran a hard-right campaign to appeal to a Republican base which certainly came out to vote, but he couldn't capture enough swing voters to come anywhere near Obama in terms of vote share - especially not with Sarah Palin on the ticket.


The Senate results look like there are going to be 41 Republicans - theoretically enough to block legislation by 'filibuster'. However, if a legislative programme with popular support (e.g. health care reform) is blocked by those Senate Republicans despite being passed in other branches of govt, there is a high probability that the Republicans will get their asses kicked in the 2010 midterm elections - with several more Senate seats last contested in 2004 up for grabs, a further shift to the Democrats looks likely. The House of Representatives is wildly Democratic.

Just heard on the news that McCain described Sarah Palin as one of the "best campaigners he's ever seen"(?!) - maybe he's been working for the Democrats all along.

Will be very interesting to see whether the Republicans do a "post-1997 Tories" and degenerate into an extremist rump party. I certainly hope so, although they may have a bit more sense. If you meet a Republican, push "Palin for 2012" as hard as you can at every opportunity.

Election turnout 64% - the highest since 1964 in the US, but still seems low compared with many countries. I wonder if the denominator includes adults who can't vote: prisoners and felons for example (of which there are a huge number)?

live: THIS SUCKER IS OVER!!!

2.30 am: that's all folks. Ohio just called called for Obama. Given that pretty much all the states to be called so far have gone according to most projections, I can't see Obama losing this. I'm following the election on the BBC site and FiveThreeEight updates. Watched 5 minutes of live footage but Dimbleby was so pants that I went back to just following the text updates.

Anyway, congratulations to America for making the right choice. You may have saved the world.
I think I'm gonna watch my DVD of Inland Empire to celebrate.

live: watching and waiting

Just coming up to the close of the first polls. BBC coverage looks incredibly dull - haven't they pensioned the persistently awful David Dimbleby off yet? Stories of voting machines breaking down in areas of Virginia with high ethnic minority populations - hopefully not decisive but worrying all the same.

Looks pretty dull, so I'll come back to you in a couple of hours or so.

Please let it be "Good Morning America" on Wednesday

Well, after what seems like the majority of this year's blog posts, we're only 26 hours away from the US election night coverage. I'll be staying up for the duration, maybe with a vodka martini in my hand, probably writing the odd blog post. This is a long post, as we're at a turning point in world history. Turning points make me nervous... I get verbal diarreoaha. (A word I can't spell). Sorry kids.

I was going to be at a party in Oxford tomorrow night but work pressures make it inadvisable for me to take the required amount of time out of my schedule to get over there and back again (really sorry, Chris). In fact I'm probably being a damn fool staying up to watch it tomorrow night - but f*** it. This is history in the making.

Democratic presidential victories have been thin on the ground in my lifetime. I was born about a month after the disastrous landslide defeat of the excellent George McGovern by the crook Richard Nixon in 1972, and was too young to remember anything about Jimmy Carter's victory in '76. There then followed three crushing defeats. It was the 1980s, and by definition, the height of Bad Politics (and Fashion).

I got luckier in 1992 with Bill Clinton; I remember frantically trying to finish an essay late at night (this was a very common occurence in Oxford, almost as common as being whacked out of my brain), I turned on my little black and white CRT TV, and there the bastard was. Difficult to tell a 'red state' from a 'blue state' in black and white (and does anybody else get confused by the fact the blue party is the 'left' party? Who came up with this lunacy?) but I knew from the commentary that Clinton had done it. That, plus the stupid Republican American woman (that old Guess Who song just came into my brain - "American Woman" - some nice guitar distortion there, folks) crying in the college bar. Her misery was our ecstasy - at least until it transpired that Clinton was barely more able to get major legislation through Congress than was Jimmy Carter, and while he managed to get re-elected (which Carter sadly didn't, despite being up against a lunatic with Alzheimer's) he spent most of his time passing crap legislation given to him by Newt Gingrich, and getting impeached. OK so he was there, which meant that a Republican fascist (or Ross Perot) wasn't there, but it was still a big disppointment.

Then we had 2000 - perhaps the biggest downer of all time. A denial of democracy - a stolen election. Banana Republic, USA - not just A Department Store. Al Gore - cast out into the nether regions ( where he eventually returned as a remarkably effective environmental campaigner). The "child-president" as Hunter S Thompson called him (shit, Hunter - why did you pull a gun on yourself, you stupid f***wit? You would have been bloody LOVING it by now, mate. It's a drag being an atheist 'cos I can't say "hope you're up there watching all this unfold" with a straight face...) GWB - Grand Dubya Bullshit. The plundering of America's assets for defense contractors and the super-rich. Environmental disaster. ANOTHER stolen election in 2004. OK, John Kerry was no way the greatest presidential candidate ever, but what in F***'s name was George Bush? a human equivalent of those polystyrene wotsits that come in couriered packages. Cheap filler for others to exploit. Jeez, in November '04 things looked fuckin lame x 2 million... Hunter, on 2nd thoughts I can understand why you pulled the trigger, mate.

But then, just when Not Expected That Much, events took a good turn in America. Iraq was the Vietnam Mark II that so many of us had predicted. Bloody awful for any of the poor bastards from Iraq itself, Britain or America that were out there, but good news for US politics. Bush's 2nd term fell apart in ways that made Clinton and Reagan's 2nd terms look like perfection itself. In 2006 the Democrats recaptured Congress and the Republicans disowned Dubya. Predictions were that any likely Republican challenger would get his (and it always was a 'he'...) ass kicked come the Nov 08 presidential election.

Then, in 2008, events played out damn weirdly. Firstly, who's this sophisticated young punk from Illinois challenging Hillary Clinton's husband-given right to the Democratic nomination? Step forward Barack Obama and the most powerful grassroots campaign in known history, outstripping even the gigantic efforts of McGovern in '72. Building on the inspirational groundwork of the Howard Dean '04 campaign, which failed, but which showed the way forward in terms of building campaign finance and momentum through millions of small donations rather than relying solely on huge handouts from big corporates. It took months and months, but Clinton's more traditional campaign was beaten off, and Obama went forward to the national stage.

Meanwhile, in the GOP ("Grand Old Party", apparently - surely the most pretentious party nickname in the world?) strange things were storing. A genuinely charismatic dingbat called Mike Huckabee made the early running in New Hampshire before being swept aside by John McCain, who, in mid-07, had looked all washed up. The brief window of apparent success for the Iraq "surge" strategy which McCain had backed all the way, temporarily transformed him into some kind of apparent visionary and there he was, winning primary after primary, with Huckabee in a fairly distant second and the others - Mitt Romney, ex-actor Fred Thompson, the laughably inept Rudy Guiliani - off the map.

I got a bit bored with the contest in the summer - between the end of the primaries and the conventions - because no-one over here seemed to be covering the damn thing anyway. But I came back with a jolt when Sarah Palin got the V-P nomination for the Reps. The initial surge in the polls for the McCain/Palin ticket made a lot of people over in the UK very scared and for a couple of weeks it looked as if history was about to repeat itself - and we were in for another Ronald Reagan style triumph of reactionary fears over progressive hopes. Fortunately, normality ("normalcy?") reasserted itself as we discovered that even in the USA, being an ignorant gun-toting fascist is no automatic guarantee of success in a post-Nixon, post-Reagan, post-Bush landscape. (And that was just John McCain...) The more Sarah Palin was revealed to be a fucking MORON, the more ecstatic I was. The more John McCain came to resemble Michael Foot's evil Yankee twin, the more happy I felt.

So here we are, on the threshold of one of three options:

1) a new dawn for America. A bit like what they got with FDR, got to some extent (although with the huge F***-off mistake of Vietnam with JFK/LBJ), and should have got with Carter - (if he had had half a clue about how to run his administration without pissing off just about everybody in Congress who was supposed to have been on his side). And like they were never going to get with Clinton.
2) Jimmy Carter Mark II. I'll expand on what I mean by this in future posts if Obama really does win, but briefly: I think his biggest danger is that he ends up not being able to pull enough strings to effect major policy changes in the notoriously sclerotic American political system. The worst scenario would have a demoralised and distant Obama having his ass kicked by Huckabee or, god help us, Palin, in 2012... kind of a sick repeat of 1980... but let's not worry about that for now.
3) Civil war in the US. This is the most extreme what awaits if McCain somehow contrives to steal the election despite being 6 or 7 points down in the popular vote. More likely of course is that FOX news comes up with some conservative academic to explain that there's been a massive "Bradley effect", there are a few demonstrations in New York City, some people get shot and the US resigns itself to President McMugabe and Vice President Michael Palin.

Let's hope for all our stakes it's option 1. If you're a US citizen and you're reading this it probably means you were enough in agreement with the basic thesis presented here to make it to the end, which means:

YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO.

(see, I've even color-coded it for you. And used your spelling of 'colour' - I'm a considerate chap. )


As George Clooney once directed:

Good night, and good luck.

Vote-rigging and civil disorder: welcome to John McMugabe's America

Some very good news for Barack Obama today on 538. With one (rogue) exception, the national tracking polls look awful for McCain, and the state-level polls look even worse.

With the Republican campaign increasingly resembling Michael Foot's ill-fated 1983 UK venture (and indeed John McCain is much the same age as Foot was back then), there has been speculation that if the polls are wildly wrong, riots could break out - or worse.

If there is an upset, right-wingers will undoubtedly try to blame it on the so-called "Bradley effect" - white voters not voting for Obama on race grounds, after saying they would vote for him in opinion polls. This despite the fact that there is considerable evidence that the Bradley effect has been negligible in any race since 2000, at least.

A far more likely explanation for the upset is systematic and widespread voter fraud - particularly in key states where the Secretary of State is a Republican - which I've discussed before. If that explanation is accepted, brace yourself for widespread civil disobedience - National Guard on the streets, protesters being shot and gassed, that sort of thing. A recreation of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, in other words.

Great blog post here (also mentioned in the Telegraph article linked above) arguing for mass non-violent civil disobedience in the event of McCain election theft. Hard to disagree - hopefully people will have learned from the mistakes of 2000 and 2004, where Bush stole the election twice.

But the only problem is that the US police and National Guard will turn a non-violent protest violent pretty damned quick. As Alex Jones among others has pointed out, America is a police state now. Which may mean that things get ugly very quickly. Although, given that even the Republicans are predicting that the Democrats will keep control (and indeed extend their majority) in both the Senate and the House, McCain and Palin wouldn't be able to get any radical right-wing legislation through anyway - so the impetus for civil disorder is somewhat diminished. The revolution will probably have to wait until the vote-rigging is even more pronounced - which, in the absence of voting reform, becomes more and more likely the longer the Republicans are in office.

US electoral fraud - could it swing things?

I'm not going to report yet on the second US presidential debate, as I haven't had time to watch it yet. For what it's worth, post-debate polling numbers look very similar to the first debate, i.e. Obama a modest winner. And that wasn't good enough for McCain, who needed a big win.

Or did he? Last night's newsnight had a piece by Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, examining the extent of electoral fraud in the US. Really frightening stuff, including such horrors as the following:

• huge numbers of (mainly low income and/or African American) voters turning up at the polls only to find that they weren't registered to vote. This was especially likely to happen in states like Colorado, with a Republican Secretary of State.
• Voters whose houses have been foreclosed (i.e. repossessed) being disenfranchised
• Voter intimidation at the polling station (which is apparently legal in some forms in the US - what the hell?)
• shortages of voting machines in polling stations in low-income neighbourhoods
• rigging of electronic voting machines (many of which have no 'audit trail', i.e. no means of establishing whether the votes counted tally with the votes actually cast.)
• new legislation requiring photo ID for people to be able to vote - people in the US without any form of photo-ID (e.g. no passport or driving licence) are overwhelmingly from the poorest section of the population.
  

Greg Palast has several earlier short films for the BBC on his website, so hopefully this one will be put up there soon, as it's a must-view. The big questions arising from this are:

1. How much worse is voter fraud now than in 2004, when it is widely acknowledged to have cost John Kerry the election?
2. Given that it looks like (hopefully) Obama will be a lot further ahead this time in terms of voting intentions than Kerry was in 2004 (or Gore in 2000) how much fraud would there need to be to 'flip' the result to McCain?

In the comments on the fivethirtyeight website I found a link to this site which claims to reveal "a [Republican] plan to steal the next election by 51.2% of the popular vote and three [electoral college] votes."

Also something even more extraordinary: an interview with a Republican "cyber-security expert" who claims that foreign hacking of voting machines could decide the election... watch that one here. I haven't had time to watch it yet but will do soon.

One thing seems obvious: the exit polls from the 2004 election was pretty close between Bush and Kerry - and although it was surprising that a number of swing states went to Bush, the overall reported share of the vote was not that far out of line with what was predicted. It was a real bummer, but it took some time for the truth to emerge that the election was rigged. And by then it was too late.

By contrast, if Obama is (say) 8% in front in the polling in the run up to election day, but the actual votes show a 2% lead for McCain, it is very likely that all hell will break loose. At the very least you could see large-scale civil disobedience, and in the most extreme scenario, civil war. I hope that Greg Palast Newsnight film gets shown in the US before polling day, so that people know what they're up against.

The US Presidential Race: debates, half-wits, and poll tracks

This is gonna be a long one, as I'm getting back to blogging out the US Presidential Election after several months out of the loop - I enjoyed the mammoth struggle between Obama and Clinton in the Democratic primaries, but once Obama won it, things got a bit boring for quite a while.

Then we had the whole Sarah Palin thing for the Republicans - a huge bounce, with McCain leading for a couple of weeks, then gradually slipping away as more and more Americans seemed to realise that whatever the glamour factor of having Palin on the ticket, she was a dangerous lunatic along the lines of Stillson from The Dead Zone (in many ways the archetypal Republican politician), most likely to lead the US into nuclear war with Russia (or whoever) at the first opportunity.

In 1996 I was standing in the British Rail (now National Express) ticket office at Walthamstow Central buying a ticket with a couple of mates, and a guy ran in and out the ticket hall at top speed. Five seconds later another guy weilding a bicycle chain ran in, stopped for two seconds to shout at us "who wants it?" then ran off again in pursuit of his poor victim. Politically speaking, Sarah Palin is the equivalent of that guy with the bicycle chain. Initially scary but then you realise she's a small time villain jumped up to the big stage. Although of course she is really no worse than Bush (Jnr) or Reagan, each of whom were, for my money, equally clueless... to say nothing of Dan Quayle.

I don't know how Palin will do in the V-P debate next week, or if it matters much given that her star seems to have fallen so fast. I don't know much about Joe Biden but if he can walk and answer his Blackberry at the same time he should be OK. Palin's performance on various chat shows recently seems to have been so lame that the Republican campaign managers are doing everything they can to keep her out of the spotlight lest she drop yet another clanger. Of course it could be the old Dubya Bush tactic of playing dumb and then progressing from no-brain to half a brain at just the right moment to exceed public expectations. (This apparently is what happened in the sequence of Bush-Kerry debates in '04: Bush was total shit in the first one, then marginally less shit in the others - giving the impression that he was on a roll. Clever stuff.) In any case, it will be interesting to see if Biden can find a killer line to equal Lloyd Bentsen's "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" against Quayle in '88.

But more interesting than this is the first Presidential debate, which took place on Friday - despite earlier assurances from John McCain that he would not show up. My impressions (and see for yourself on the BBC site) were:

Obama: competent without being amazing. Did fairly well on the economy although in the current situation it would have been almost impossible for him not to. I thought he was good on foreign policy - McCain seemed to think that the only way to assess a situation in Iraq/Afghanistan was to go there oneself, in which case presumably we can get rid of all military intelligence personnel and just parachute the President in whenever we need to find something out. Yeah, right. (Of course, there are good grounds for wanting to see with one's own eyes what's going on, given that the Bush administration lies all the time - but on foreign policy, McCain supports the Bush administration. In fact he's even more wedded to crazy militaristic adventures in foreign policy than Bush/Cheney were, if that's possible.)

It seems to me that Obama's more open and conciliatory demeanour will go down well with voters - he called McCain "John" a lot, said when he thought McCain was right about something, gave credit where credit was due. Some would say this is too "nice guy" an approach and he should have got down and dirty more but remember that the job to do here is to win over the swing voters. No point playing the tough guy to please your hardcore support - this is a good time to try to convince people who may not be wanting to vote at all 'cos they are so f***ed off with the whole thing (and there are tens of millions of people like that in the US). Obama did lay into McCain at strategic points, and it worked pretty well.

McCain: body language and general posture was pretty bad - he looks like he's been taking lessons from Andrew Green of Migration Watch. Certainly not the complete moron that some pro-Obama commentators have been claiming - but not brilliantly articulate, either. Very negative in most of the exchanges. Did a reasonably good job of criticising the Bush administration where he felt things needed to be done differently (e.g. the pork barrel - I've no idea if McCain really would get rid of substantial amounts of pork-barrelling - it seems unlikely given the corporate domination of US politics - but to the uninitiated voter it probably came across well.)

One thing is - McCain just looks really old. This may not matter - from footage of the Reagan-Mondale debates in '84 Reagan looks half dead and he still won - but I get the feeling the guy is a US Brezhnev and could drop dead at any minute. If that happens, of course, you guys get President Palin. The Democrats should be running scare stuff on this all the time.

The general media consensus was that it was close-run with Obama just shading it - and I'd go along with that. Anything less than a big win for McCain in the last two debates is disastrous for the Republicans as the economic crisis has come along at just the right time for the Democrats, who must be very relieved that real issues are under discussion now, rather than whether Sarah Palin is a pig with lipstick or not.

My feeling now is that barring some sort of major tragedy (another terrorist attack? Joe Biden revealed to be Barney the dinosaur in disguise? etc.) the Democrats have got this sown up. The excellent polling site FiveThirtyEight agrees with me, at least at the moment. Even so, I'll be a little nervous come election day in November (probably with a beer in my hand.) There's always a danger this could be like Labour in the UK in 1992, after all. (Someone should tell Barack Obama about the Sheffield rally). And I'll be more nervous afterwards if Obama gets in - what's he gonna do about the economy? Because he said very little on Friday to make me think he had any idea what to do about the onset of recession, let alone depression... are we looking at a Jimmy Carter Mark 2 here? I leave you with that thought.

Democrats: getting ready for a major league "stitch-up"

I'm using the excuse that Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Wyoming Primary to file another report on the interminable struggle for the Democratic nomination. And it really is interminable, as the projections for the remaining 12 states now show that it is very unlikely that Obama will reach 2025 delegates based on elected delegates alone; which means that the 800 unelected 'super-delegates' - party officials - will be decisive.

Current projections show a split of around 60%-40% in super-delegates between Clinton and Obama but that's largely irrelevant when the Democratic convention comes around in August because they don't have to vote any particular way - they are guns for hire, perhaps literally. It is entirely possible that Clinton could somehow swing a majority of super-delegates around, even though she is very unlikely to have more of the elected delegate vote than Obama by then.

My worry isn't so much that this would be "unfair" - it's not immediately obvious that 100% election by caucus or primary (some of which involve independent voters who may be Republican sympathisers!) is the best way to choose a candidate, and an electoral college between party officials and voters (which is what they effectively have at the moment) might make more sense. It's more that, if there is such a deal and Clinton gets the nomination, a lot of Obama supporters are going to be so pissed off that they're not going to bother to turn out and vote in the presidential election in November. The same might happen in reverse with Clinton supporters if Obama wins the nomination, but I think that's less likely because he could at least claim he has the weight of "popular opinion on his side.

This struggle is dragging on and on - largely because Obama's support softened badly in Texas and Ohio when he ran into a wave of negative publicity about the corruption rap for his friend Tony Rezko, and he didn't handle it very well as far as the footage from the press conference I saw on Channel 4 news suggested. Of course the footage could have been edited to make it look like just about anything, but you can be damn sure that a successful Democratic candidate will have to be able to deal with the media onslaught and scandals both real and manufactured just to survive. Bill Clinton went from strength to strength largely because he was able to do that; Jimmy Carter got blown away after one term largely because he couldn't. The real danger is that Obama ends up suffering the same fate as Carter, rather than being able to combine the sense of resuscitating the corpse of political hope that both Carter and JFK embodied with the political balls of the Clintons. Both Bill and Hillary are real sluggers, as is Dubya Bush, and any successful president needs some of that. You can't biuild yourself up by cultivating a sense of hope in people and then fall apart when the going gets tough. That's the route to landslide defeat and condemning the Democrats to another generation of impotence (once again, look at Carter in 1980).

So, extra rations of bile and roughage for Obama over these next couple of months and he ought to be able to get through this. But if he looks too weedy or flaky then it's gonna be Hillary Clinton for the nomination. Should be interesting.

Somewhere, John McCain is rubbing his hands at the prospect of 5 more months of Democratic infighting. But as the poll ratings of both Democratic contenders against him in the election have risen since all this started, maybe the joke's on him...

McCain, Mike's 335, and the small prospect of a backlash

John McCain is looking in a pretty strong position after the Republican Super Tuesday primaries. Although he didn't win most of the Super Tuesday states overwhelmingly, he benefited a lot from a split opposition - Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney were both courting the 'real conservative' vote, but Huckabee had difficulty reaching outside the hardcore evangelical Southern Christian base leaving Romney with a motley crew of everyone else in the Republican party who didn't like McCain. As most of the Republican primaries are 'winner-take-all' this meant McCain piled on delegates - he's now more than halfway towards the nomination.

The immediate result of this was that Romney threw in the towel last Thursday. Actually that's not quite accurate; he's "suspended" his campaign, meaning that his delegates will still be in play at the Republican Convention. I'll explain why this is important in just a second. But overall, many will be glad to see the back of Romney, so let's dwell on his misfortune for a second. A slimy cheeseball punk who made George Bush look like an honest man, he spent extraordinarily heavily to low great effect and his campaign ran second only to Giuliani's in its ineptness. To their credit, the Republican voters seem to know an unelectable turkey when they see one. McCain is definitely their best shot at the White House, despite the fact that he is older than Michael Foot was when he was leading Labour in the 1983 UK election. (Now that is an interesting comparison...)

Something weird happened in the primaries this weekend just gone, though. Mike Huckabee suddenly went back into overdrive, winning in Kansas and Lousiana. Could this be the start of a conservative fightback? Mike certainly knows how to strap on a Gibson (at 00:57 in the video), but I think it's all too late. Still, it all depends on how well organised the Christian anti-McCain hard right is (and how many of them actually don't want McCain to win; Bush and selected other right-wingers have already endorsed him so that may well be enough.) I'm still hoping we'll be hearing that 335 a while longer...

Obama moves into the driving seat...

...or very close to it, anyway. Almost a week since Super Tuesday, and I should have got it together to post earlier, but there was just too much stuff going on. Anyway, waiting a few days allows me to incorporate the results from the Democratic primaries in Maine, Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington. Obama was some way ahead of Hillary Clinton in all four of these and unless Clinton can win by a substantial margin in Ohio and Texas in March, it looks very much like her campaign is gonna run into the ground.

That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that Obama is a shoo-in because a few hundred of the Convention delegates are local party appointees rather than being elected. Clinton is - currently - ahead in terms of the number of these 'super-delegates' who have come out in her favour. But it's impossible to know for sure how they will vote as they are representing no-one but themselves (and maybe the local party bigwigs). It's a weird overlay of cronyism on what is basically a democratic selection process, and it could mean that Clinton gets the nomination despite having less delegates than Obama. Which could tear the party apart at the Convention... the Obama camp must be hoping that Barack gets a clear enough lead by the summer that he won't need to rely on the super-delegates. That may well happen if the pro-Obama swing continues, but that's pure speculation at this stage. Next stops Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. It's a constant gravy train...

US elections - the fields thin out...

Big news from both US presidential races yesterday as dropouts were announced.

For the Democrats, John Edwards has thrown in the towel after failing to make much impact in any of the primaries so far, running a distant third behind the media frenzy enveloping Clinton and Obama. Despite making substantial criticisms of Clinton's attacks on Obama during the early primaries, Edwards is not endorsing either Clinton or Obama - for now. This is probably strategic - keeping his options open to cut a running-mate deal with whoever wins the presidential nomination. It's a pity Edwards didn't make more headway as he was the most radical of the candidates and the only one who made action to reduce the shocking levels of poverty in America the centrepiece of his campaign. To a large extent he has been eclipsed by the emergence of Barack Obama as the alternative to the Clinton dynasty in this campaign - although Obama's policy platform isn't actually that radical.

Meanwhile, after what has turned out to be the most strategically wrongheaded campaign in recent history, one-time favourite Rudy Giuliani has pulled out of the Republican race. Giuliani's campaign was a disaster, full stop ("period"). He didn't bother to campaign in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan etc because he was concentrating on Florida because it had a lot more convention delegates. What he didn't take into account is that by failing to compete in those early primaries he looked like an also-ran time after time, and he missed out on any media coverage. The strategy might have worked if the early results had been a complete mess, with none of the other candidates gaining any net advantage, but the fact that John McCain was in the lead by Florida, and that McCain was also the candidate whose policy stance is closest to Giuliani's, effectively wrote him off. It's an extraordinary failure for the guy who was at one stage being touted as the great white hope for '08. Giuliani has endorsed McCain.

The boys are back with the Barack

(with apologies to Alan Partridge...)

Good result for Barack Obama in the South Carolina primary. 55% for Obama against 27% for Clinton is a huge victory margin and it looks like Obama benefited from a backlash against the increasingly negative campaigning of the Bill and Hilary double act. Those two are pulling dirty tricks out of the bag as fast as they can, in a way that suggest they may be running pretty scared... and it's gonna be interesting to see what they pull out next in the run up to 'Super Tuesday' in 9 days' time.

I was surprised to see John Edwards not doing better than 18% of the vote in what is almost his home turf, but I think he's been squeezed badly in the Clinton/Obama crossfire. Nonetheless, if he stays in the race up to and including Super Tuesday he could still emerge with enough delegates to hold the balance of power at the Democratic Convention, if it's a close enough race.

I've not yet seen detailed polling from any of the Super Tuesday states so at this point there's not much more to say on this topic at this point in time - I'll come back to it later in the week.

Clinton vs Obama: close calls, stupid voting systems and stupid voters

Results from the Nevada Democratic primary show a narrow win for Hillary Clinton.

Or at least, the headline results do. The actual delegate figures show Obama with 13 delegates from Nevada to Clinton's 12. This is due to the idiotic first-past-the-post system of delegate selection by precinct (and that isn't a dig at the States because we have the same stupid system for our elections - it's how New Labour ensures a working majority with only 35% of the vote.) Overall, Obama has 38 delegates to Clinton's 36, with Edwards on 18.

What this means is that one has to 'read the small print', i.e. look at how the primary and caucus results are translating to numbers of delegates at the Democratic Convention in the summer, before making any predictions on who's going to get the nomination. Based on current evidence the Democratic race looks too close to call and it's entirely possible that neither Obama nor Clinton will end up with the necessary 2,025 delegates by the time of the Convention - which could leave Edwards as the 'kingmaker'. An interesting thought.

Also interesting, if a little spooky, is BBC North America editor Justin Webb's claim in his blog today that some people haven't been voting for Barack Obama in the primaries because they think he's a Muslim. Well, I guess if the American education system is set up to produce drones - both working and middle class - who get their entire info from Fox News, then this is the kind of crap you end up with. And that's not to say the UK system is any better - anyone who remembers the 1987 general election and the widely touted claim that if Kinnock won, Soviet Tanks would be rolling down Whitehall within 48 hours, will know there's no room for complacency.

Republicans '08: and the frontrunner is...?

The Republican primaries continue to provide electoral excitement here in dreary old blighty. (Well, at least to sad people like me who find the presidential race interesting.)

The Michigan primary yesterday resulted in a comeback for Mitt Romney, who got 39% of the vote to McCain's 30%, with Huckabee third with 16%. This means total confusion for electoral pundits already reeling from Hillary Clinton's surprise win in New Hampshire after being written off.

Romney's winning speech in Michigan was lame even by the low standards we've come to expect from this campaign. "Tonight marks the beginning of a comeback for America" indeed... the guy is a third-rate cheeseball - even by the low standards we've come to expect... etc. etc. It's quite possible he only managed to win Michigan because it's his home state.

Right now, one would have to be brave, rich or stupid (or all 3?) to put a bet on who's gonna win this Republican campaign. All this confusion is probably going to help Rudy Guiliani a lot as by targeting his resources on the Florida primary in late January and then a blitz on 'Super Tuesday' on 5 Feb, he may be able to exploit a divided field and emerge as the frontrunner. Advertising agencies must be having a field day - after all, the longer there are multiple candidates in the race, the more money is spent on advertising in aggregate. Good to see someone's doing well out of the current US economic collapse.

Barack Obama storms out of the blocks...

And so, as promised, on to the Democratic race, where, only 4 days into the campaign proper, Hillary Clinton is already starting to look like a lame duck. The general media consensus was that the amount of funds raised by the Clinton campaign and the support of Bill would be enough to propel her through the primaries with Barack Obama a creditable second, and John Edwards a long way back in the rear.

Instead, what seems to be happening - based on the results from Iowa and the latest polls in New Hampshire - is that Obama is surging into a big lead, with Edwards and Clinton fighting over second place. Obama got 38% of the vote in Iowa with Edwards and Clinton pretty much tied at 30%. One of the polls from New Hampshire puts Obama 10 points in front - and if the actual result goes that way, it would be an even bigger upset than Iowa.

The factor that seems to be propelling Obama to the front of the field seems to be a big surge in support among young activists and voters - see, for example, this BBC piece. It could be that, like George McGovern in 1972, Obama is going to cruise to the Democratic nomination on a wave of youth radicalism - but unlike McGovern, there is a strong possibility Obama has the charisma to go all the way to the White House.

This of course, doesn't mean in itself that he'll be any good. Democratic presidents of whom much was expected have been complete letdowns before - Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter (although his focus on energy policy now looks extremely ahead of his time) and, arguably, even JFK. However, Obama does have the advantage of not being George W Bush, Hilary Clinton, or Mike Huckabee, which, given the state of politics in the US, might be as good as any reason to vote for him.

To finish, a few words on John Edwards, who is unlikely to get the nomination - he doesn't have anything like the campaign funding that Clinton or Obama have, but his decision to mount a (relatively) left-wing campaign highlighting the appalling levels of poverty that exist in the US and a strategy to reduce them, is to be applauded. He may well decide to drop out if he has won few or no primaries by 'Super Tuesday' in February, but he'd surely be a good choice for running-mate if Obama does get the nomination. An Obama-Edwards ticket would be about as good as we can expect from the Democrats this year, and should be strong enough to beat anyone the Republicans can come up with.

I Hate Huckabee (even though I don't know him at all well... yet.)

The US presidential election kicked into life yesterday with the results from the Iowa caucuses. Whereas most news reports seem to have covered the Democratic results first, I'm gonna start with the Republicans in this post, just for the hell of it. And also because I didn't know who the hell Mike Huckabee was until this morning.

Looking like a morph between John Hutton and Robert Lindsay, former Arkansas governor Huckabee got 34% of the Iowa vote, 9% in front of Mitt Romney, who had expected to win after spending heavily. Everyone else was a long way behind.

A surprise result, according to most of the news sites, and especially to me, as the last time I looked at the Republican race in any detail (which was about October, I think), the front-runners were Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain, with Ronald Reagan wannabee Fred Thompson as a wild card outsider. Huckabee didn't even figure on the menu - he was out there with principled no-hopers like the libertarian congressman Ron Paul. But here he is with 34%.

Of course, Huckabee has God On His Side - his main strength seems to be that he is the 'genuine article' religious conservative. Evangelicals have serious doubts about the relatively late conversion of Romney to the anti-abortion platform, and Giuliani is viewed in certain parts as pretty much a Satanist for his pro-choice stance. All this plays pretty well with a certain constituency of Republican voters - who I guess are probably the same kind of people who can be bothered to turn up at caucus meetings in the middle of winter in Iowa. You know... the hardcore.

I checked out the Huckabee site and the initial quote from him on there is not promising:

I think the country is looking for somecody who is vertical, who is thinking, 'let's take America up and not down.'

A vertical candidate's probably preferable to a horizontal one - I'll give him that. But surely the vertical axis runs up and down? I mean, what is this cack? A click on 'learn more' takes us to the blog page, with a roll of about 200 Huckabee-supporting blogs. Jeez, Mick... "there's too many of them". I'll be restarting Hal's Friday Evening Blog Review as Huckerbee's Sunday Evening Blog Review (the day of the Lord) in a couple of days' time.

God-fearing Democrats and even the odd agnostic will probably be praying tonight that Huckabee continues to gather momentum to the extent that Giuliani's campaign pretty much collapses before 'Super Tuesday' in early February, where he's spending most of his campaign funds on trying to get a big result in Florida and other key states. If Huckabee can mop up the Romney and Thompson support he certainly stands a reasonable chance of getting the Republican nomination, and that would be the biggest help to the Democrats since the days of 1964 and Barry Goldwater. That is, of course, assuming that hardcore religious conservatism, making even George Bush look wishy-washy, is a big turnoff to a large enough section of the US electorate. If it isn't, then we really are in big Barney Rubble. But back to that sometime soon...

It should be stressed however that this is VERY early days. If Iowa turns out to be a complete freak-out and Romney does well in New Hampshire and the other primaries over the next few weeks, Huckabee will be out of the race probably by the end of February. However, no-one in the US (or UK) media predicted this result so I don't feel particularly compelled to stick to the form-book any time in the near future. Next post... the Democratic race.