All Eyes On America

It’s here! Super Tuesday. Or, as we in Britain call it, Pancake Day. In this country, as is well documented in the Magna Carta and in other documents such as that fore-runner to the Land Registry, the Doomsday Book, and numerous Council meeting minutes, our democratic process revolves mainly around pancakes. Indeed, was in not Margaret Thatcher herself that sealed her right-wing political bent by a gratuitously poor-aimed pancake throw in the dark Chamber of Tossery in the basement of the House of Commons. Was it not a similarly wayward throw of the ideology pancake in that same chamber that dictated Tony Blair’s lurch to the right in 1997? Indeed, the process by which seasoned MP’s, party whips and lobbyists hope to dampen the pancake by applying a dose of syrup here, or a clove of butter there, or even just giving the flour mixture a sound beating so as to affect its path when the Throwing Poll begins has been an essential part of British politics for centuries. Who can forget the awesome japery that lead to Iain Duncan Smith’s fatal toss a few years ago. Then, as the once-proud politician stood stock-still in the chambers, pancake on face as tipsy journalists guffawed with laughter, and molten butter ran down his sleeves, political punditry excelled in an orgy of column-inches about the wrongness of his throwing technique.

But still, that is here. And tonight’s competition will be a hushed affair, none of the ticker tape and confetti evident across the Atlantic will appear as Gordon Brown tugs sharply at his lapels and then spins with effortless ease his one pancake into the centre of the chamber, dictating for another year the angle which his politics should take. And of course, as none of this is really happening, we might as well take a look at things across ‘the pond’ at the competition that might help shape global politics for perhaps as much as the next eight years.

Super Tuesday (or Super Duper Tuesday, or Mega Tuesday, or The Day of Rampant Change) as I may or may not have explained correctly last month, is the voting of over twenty states to decide the Democratic and Republican nominees to run in the general election in November. There have been a few primaries already, and all that has been decided is that Obama and Clinton are neck and neck, John McCain has reversed his fortunes astoundingly to seize an opportunity that will perhaps see him as the Republican nominee tomorrow morning, and that ‘America’s Mayor’ Rudolph Giuliani made a tragic miscalculation in putting all his eggs in the Floridian basket. It has been pointed out, in the lattermost case, that this mistake resulted from his missing out on the publicity available in the earlier competitions, so that he became an irrelevance, and also the fact that the more the Florida public got to know about Giuliani, the less they warmed to him. A lot of talk about the past and none about the future. Incidentally, on the Republican side, there are still two other possibilities, the Mormon millionaire of tanned skin, portably air-brushed, taut of face, clean of feature and pressed of suit, Mitt Romney; and the favourite man of the evangelicals and that Bible-embracing group of insane creationists, the Christian Right, Mike Huckabee. There was someone a little more palatable (by Republican standards) called Ron Paul but he appears to have sensibly foregone the extreme expense of transporting a failed campaign ping-pong style across that vast country. On the Democratic side John Edwards bowed out gracefully, but only after a nice stint at playing primary school teacher when the toddlers Clinton and Obama got out of hand on a televised debate and started throwing toys out of their collective prams.

Here then, is the Totally Infallible Guide to Super Duper Tuesday, dumbed down for us Brits who don’t need intricacies:

Each party has its own rules, and this being the United States, each State also has its own rules. Amazingly the parties seem powerless to stop some wayward states from crashing the process and can only penalise them accordingly. That show-stopping state, Florida, site of so many of the tribulations of the American political process, illegally moved their primary to before Super Tuesday so as to have more influence but was roundly shut out of the Democratic contest as a result. Their delegates will not be allowed into the party convention where the nominee is actually picked after a round of ballots. Clinton will try and reverse this, as she ended up winning when the other two pulled out in protest. The Democratic party does not have a ‘winner takes all’ system, therefore delegates can be won in states by candidates who do not win the overall state. States have numbers of delegates approximately in proportion to their size, therefore California is the Death By Chocolate of this occasion, while smaller states like Maine and Wyoming are more like your Tic-Tacs or Wine Gums. New York is possibly a strawberry cheesecake, fruity on the top with a luscious biscuit under-base, much like the actual city – which did pose tunnelling problems for those mavericks who dug the Subway, but I digress.

In terms of who will do well where, that depends a great deal on the demographics of each State, which vary wildly across that massive country. Candidates tend to do well in their home states. Democrats in general do better in urban areas, while Republicans do better in rural areas – a fact largely irrelevant in the primaries but which will affect the general election. Obama is likely to do better in the more African-American populated south, and also in his home state in Illinois, but may fair less well in Hispanic-populated areas on the south-west and west coast such as New Mexico and Nevada. He does seem popular among disillusioned Republicans and Independents, however. Clinton seems to have strong support in New York, which is obvious, and seems ever-so-slightly ahead in many other states, including the grand prize California. Obama is, as has been pointed out repeatedly, catching up though. Republicans seem to be switching to elderly statesman McCain in droves, a thought unthinkable a few months ago. But he upsets many grassroots republican ultra-conservatives, who want a dick-swinging trigger-happy testosterone-fest with a rusted, red pick-up truck, his own ranch, a penchant for American family values, tightening of immigration, unfundable tax cuts, the death of the last semblances of a welfare system and adventurism in dusty Middle-Eastern societies and a special horn kept under the bed from which he can hear voices from God telling him to instigate a Crusade among the uncivilised ones and to for-Christ’s-sake keep those ‘eye’-raqi terrorists from landing on the roof of the sheriff’s offices and releasing all those sinning Prohibition-breaking whisky smugglers from raping their honest daughters. At this point, though possibly several paragraphs before, my knowledge becomes very ropey, and incidentally if you are depending on my blog for some honest information about this contest then you had better seek psychiatric help. I don’t mean the phone number at the end of Hollyoaks, I mean a proper head-to-head power-chat with a psychotherapist, or at the very least a bus driver. Here is what CNN have to say, and they have plenty of links - though the main news site will be better if Super Tuesday is significantly over. If, like me, you get frustrated at constant references to the GOP then I have it on authority that GOP simply means the Republican Party. It stands for ‘Grand Old Party’ and is a familiar acronym among American’s of both stripes.

To continue. In California, ancient rules (by American standards, dating back to 1966) dictate that the governor of the state will fire rounds into the air from a six-chamber pistol while the candidates run through a course of tyres spread on the ground. At the last shot, the candidate who has gone furthest will be awarded the next delegate. With over four hundred delegates, it is a gruelling contest. There is speculation that Bill Clinton will don a Hillary mask and take alternate rounds. In Nevada, delegate-assignments are based on slot machines. One-armed bandit rounds will be repeated until a winner is found. It is generally good practice to donate the quarters won to charity, though famously Nixon had them bugged and placed in rivals’ pockets. Quartergate rocked American political society. Illinois primaries are generally decided by the Democratic Water Skiing Championship on Lake Michigan, within sight of the beautiful Chicago skyline. Obama is bound to do well here, due to waterfront support and his proven track record of superior balance when confronted by shark attacks. In New York, in a break with tradition, the infamous scaling of the Statue of Liberty has been repealed on security grounds and replaced with a Belgian Waffle-Eating Contest that will favour the Clintons. Hillary is reported to have been in training for many months, and has even perfected the potentially fatal ‘nasal-technique’ of ingestion. Alabama on the other hand, is having a good old-fashioned contest with voting on paper ballots that will be ingeniously filled-in behind partitions and then deposited in a so-called ‘ballot box’. Use of guns is optional. And so on. You get the idea.

Expect there to be plenty of chatter tomorrow morning from political pundits about how wrong the polls got it, how there is no clear winner in the Democratic primaries but that (unfortunately, in my opinion) Obama may have a slightly steeper hill to climb. McCain may effectively get a coronation tomorrow morning, though Romney might be stubborn, with plenty of his personal fortune left to spend, and keep going to spite him anyway. We are talking about his opposing a person who refused to be released from Vietnamese torture until the rest of his soldier friends were released though. The guy has balls. He is Republican and it would be horrific to have him in the White House, especially after the years of ghastly vandalism that have been committed there since the turn of the millennium, but you can’t take that away from him. Personally, if I had a vote, I would be leaning heavily towards Obama. But that is a whole other (and entirely subjective) story.

I can’t help thinking that if they just all got their act together, in the name of unity, and settled the whole ugly, false business with a nice gentle bout of pancake-jousting on a gently sloping field in rural Wiltshire, while summer-dressed forty-somethings, pipe-smokers and retired sheep-dippers looked on and clapped every-so-softly in genuine rapture and good-nature, that the image of understatement produced would make the whole gravity of this situation all the more awe-inspiring.

A Correction

When I did last harp on about the US primaries, at the beginning of the year (and was so bold as to put an image, heaven forefend, on my blog), I had conducted the same level of scant research that I have this time. Though in fairness I have become obsessed with the whole gripping spectacle since then, like a reality television show where the outcome has an impact beyond a week of tabloid headlines and an entry in an End of Year four-hour spectacular countdown called “Celebrities That You Wish Disney Would Scoop Up And Throw Off A Cliff In The Same Manner That They Did With Those Lemmings” (see here). But in my deficient research, I tried to palm off caucuses and primaries as one and the same. A primary is an election open to the public to decide the nominee of a particular party, whilst a caucus has the same aim, but is conducted behind closed doors with only politicians able to vote, and is preceded by speeches from the candidates. All of the contests I referred to in that blog were primaries, not caucuses. Damn it.