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March 5: All Done

Vermont Democrats, you are the odd men and women out.

As predicted, you voted for Barack Obama. Nobody else did.

Well, millions of others did. It's just that nowhere else were they a majority. In Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas, your fellow Democrats chose Hillary Clinton. Narrowly in Texas, but by wide margins in the other two states.

So despite your best efforts, the race continues, with a new twist or two. Obama still leads Clinton in delegates. But now, for the moment, she has…well, if not exactly momentum, at least energy.

And he has a big problem, not simply because he lost but because of how and when he lost.

He lost at the end. Last Friday, Obama was ahead in Texas, just about tied in Ohio, and leading in the national polls. On Tuesday, he lost Texas, got whumped in Ohio, and was tied with Clinton in the nationwide Gallup tracking survey, having dropped eight percentage points in four days.

What happened? Well, maybe that Clinton commercial about how she would (and, by implication, he wouldn't) know what to do if a national security emergency hit at 3 AM had some impact. But that ad was shown only in Texas. It couldn't account for Clinton's 54-44 percent win in Ohio.

What hurt Obama there was his mishandling of the story about one of his advisors supposedly telling Canadian officials not to take seriously Obama's attacks on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a treaty the typical Ohioan (perhaps incorrectly) blames for the loss of some 300,000 factory jobs in that state since the new century began.

Obama and his aides first denied that any such meeting had taken place. It had. Then they claimed that the advisor had been misquoted. Perhaps he had. But for the moment, the candidate who had presented himself as above engaging in politics as usual seemed to be playing politics as usual, and rather ineptly.

In other words, the question "Is this guy really ready for prime time?" has not conclusively been answered in the affirmative.

But—thanks in part to you Vermont Democrats—he still has roughly 100 more convention delegates than Clinton. To convince enough of the unpledged delegates to support her, Clinton is going to have to win convincingly someplace else, notably in Pennsylvania on April 22. Nine other states have not yet chosen their delegates. The next contests are the Wyoming caucuses this Saturday and the Mississippi primary next Tuesday.

As for Vermont, it was not close. Obama won by 62-to-38 percent. A few folks opted for ex-contenders John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich, whose names remained on the ballot. (These are unofficial results; official results will be available next Tuesday at 11 AM at the Secretary of State's office and on its web site at http://www.sec.state.vt.us/). That should give Obama at least 10 of the state's 15 pledged delegates, and he already has most of the unpledged "super" delegates from Vermont.

As usual when a candidate wins that big, Obama won just about everywhere and among just about all constituencies, according to the exit polls.

Also winning pretty much everywhere was Sen. John McCain, now over the top in pledged delegates, and therefore the Republican nominee. Mike Hucakbee came in a distant second and late Tuesday evening withdrew from the race. Ron Paul came in a more distant third and is concentrating on holding onto his seat in Congress.

And that, as someone once said, is all he wrote.

March 4: Today's the Day

OK, everybody. This is it. Primary Day. All of you who vote in partisan primaries (for professional reasons, a few of us do not) get out there and vote today.

And prepare to be spun tonight and tomorrow.

This is politics, where perception can become reality, so sometimes what happens is less important than the interpretation of what has happened. If the results of today's primaries are as ambiguous as the polls suggest, the spinning by the campaigns and the profundity (minimal, usually) of the pundits and TV chatterers could be decisive.

Alas, in all of this as in so much else, we Vermonters are likely to be but an afterthought. Of the four states voting today, ours is the only one in which the outcome is in no doubt. Barack Obama will win today's Vermont Democratic primary.

In only a little less doubt is the outcome expected from our fellow-New Englanders in Rhode Island. There, all the polls have shown Hillary Clinton in the lead. It isn't a big lead, so the Obama forces are not deluding themselves in thinking they have a chance. They do, albeit a small one.

But let's face it. We New Englanders are the small fry today compared with Texas and Ohio. They're not just the big states; they're the close contests, and therefore the ones whose results will be open to interpretation.

As of Tuesday morning, most polls showed Obama ahead in Texas, though not by much, and Clinton holding a small but steady (maybe even expanding) lead in Ohio. Just to confuse matters further, the weather is terrible in northern Ohio, especially around Cleveland, where Obama is strong. Advantage Clinton. Except that bad weather discourages more older people and rural folks from voting. Disadvantage Clinton. Go figure.

Instead of trying to predict who will win what—a fool's errand—let's try to cut through the dross of the commentators, who will speak and write millions of words tonight and tomorrow, all of which boil down to:

• If Obama wins both Texas and Ohio the race is over. Clinton will drop out, either immediately or within a few days, either because leading Democrats pressure her or—more likely—because she is not given to self-delusion.
• If Clinton wins both those states, the race continues, with a new "narrative." The question will switch from "Can Hillary hang on?" to "Has Obama been weighed and found wanting?"
• If, as seems quite likely, they split—say Obama wins Texas and Clinton wins Ohio—then what happens?

Well, in that case it might be a good idea to turn off the TV for a few hours tonight because the speculators will be speculating in ignorance. Nobody knows, probably including the candidates themselves. There will be some pressure on Clinton to drop out. But she is no quitter. If she wins Ohio big and loses Texas narrowly, she might well stay in. The next big primary is on April 22 in Pennsylvania, where she looks strong.

Meanwhile, John McCain will almost surely wrap up the Republican nomination today officially, about a month after he wrapped it up effectively. He should win all four states, including this one in a walk. But that doesn't mean there will be nothing of note happening in the Republican primary here. Check to see who comes in second. It just could be Ron Paul over Mike Huckabee. The political significance of such an outcome would be minimal to nonexistent, but it would say something about our state. Just what that something might be is uncertain, and not necessarily comforting.

March 2: Primary Primer

Now that we are on the verge of the Vermont presidential primary, it is certainly not too early to ask this basic question: Why do we have one?

Well, to choose delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions, of course. But a state need not make these choices in a primary. It can use a caucus-convention system, and for most of its history, that's what Vermont did.

So did most of the other states, until early in the last century when the Progressive movement sought to get political decision-making out of the hands of "bosses," who made their choices behind closed doors, out of public scrutiny and in what were always (or at least always described as ) "smoke-filled rooms."

Like other states, Vermont adopted the presidential primary for the 1916 and 1920 elections (won, as we no doubt all recall, by Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding, respectively). But a funny thing happened in both those primaries: almost nobody voted. The state—then smaller, poorer, more rural, less educated—wasn't ready for reform. Starting in 1924 and for the next 12 presidential elections, Vermont went back to caucuses.

By the mid-1970s, though, television was doing what Progressivism could not—taking at least some political decision-making out of closed rooms and into the open. More and more states were switching to primaries, and some felt Vermont should join that trend.

Among them was William Doyle, then a young state senator from Montpelier, who in 1975 sponsored legislation to set up presidential primaries in Vermont.

"We lost," said Doyle, who is still a state senator from Montpelier, although reportedly not as young. "Peanut Kennedy wrote a letter to every representative saying a primary was a bad idea."

Who Kennedy?

"Walter," Doyle explained. "Walter (Peanut) Kennedy from Chelsea was speaker of the House." He had also been the Republican who lost to Gov. Tom Salmon in 1974.

Kennedy had clout, but not as much as U.S. Sen. George Aiken, who issued a statement in Washington that night supporting the primary. So the bill came back to the House, where it squeaked through.

"But it was too late," Doyle said. "It was one day too late for the senate to suspend its rules to vote on the bill."

Like the Brooklyn Dodger fans of yore, then, the Vermont pro-primary forces had to "wait til next year."

Not long into it, though. Both houses passed the bill in January of 1976 and Salmon quickly signed it. Still, time was a factor. The presidential campaign was already in full swing and the candidates had not planned on campaigning in Vermont, which so far as they knew had no primary.

"So we got on the phone," said Doyle, speaking of himself and the other sponsors of the legislation. I personally called the staffs of the candidates to tell them we had a primary."

Five of them came, including Jimmy Carter, who ended up winning the election.

One argument used by the anti-primary faction was that primaries cost more than caucuses. They do, and Vermonters are famously frugal. So, Doyle recalled, "the secretary of state, Richard Thomas, arranged to have all the ballots placed in the lobby of the State House. From there, Vermont legislators delivered them to the town clerks. This created a lot of attention in the national media and reporters came to Vermont, and it became a national story representing Vermont's frugality."

Needless to say, that doesn't happen any more. But not much else has changed except that, to comply with the rules of both parties, since 1996 voters have had to declare which party's ballot they are selecting, and their choice is a matter of public record.

The other difference is that until now Vermont's primary didn't matter, at least as far as determining who would win the nomination. Now, at least on the Democratic side, it just might.

Feb. 25: This Is a Campaign

Hey folks, we have an actual presidential primary campaign going here.

No, we are not likely to have another actual presidential candidate in the state. John McCain's brief Valentine's Day visit was probably it. Mike Huckabee, McCain's chief challenger, if he still merits that title, is so far behind in Vermont that he might be embarrassed simply to show his face (assuming, for the moment, that presidential candidates remain embarassable). And both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are frying much bigger fish in Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island to make it worth their while to spend any time with us minnows.

But both Democrats have offices and campaign staffs here. Both are advertising on Vermont television stations. And both are holding events and issuing statements on behalf of their candidates.

Not that it looks like much of a contest. The only recent poll, by the American Research Group, shows Obama leading Clinton by 60-to-34 percent. The Republican race is even more lopsided. McCain got 73 percent of the sample, and Huckabee wasn't even in second place. Ron Paul was, though Paul has all but stopped campaigning. He got 11 percent in the poll to Huckabee's nine percent (that's actually just about tied).

No real surprise there. In Vermont, the most conservative voters are (a) a small minority; and (b) more likely to be leave-me-alone libertarians than religious moralists.

But there is no more doubt that McCain will win this primary as there is that he will win the nomination.

As to the Democrats, Clinton may be far behind here, but her supporters are not giving up. Their Vermont co-chairs are the state's two most prestigious Democratic women—former Gov. Madeleine Kunin and House Speaker Gaye Symington. The campaign held a debate-watching party in Burlington for last week's Texas debate, and when it ended, Vermont reporters got an email from Clinton's communications chief, Howard Wolfson, arguing that, "what we saw in the final moments in that debate is why Hillary Clinton is the next President of the United States. Her strength, her life experience, her compassion. She's tested and ready."

In fact, Clinton was excellent throughout the debate. But so was Obama.

Who has his share of big-name Vermont supporters—Sen. Patrick Leahy, Rep. Peter Welch, and both Ben and Jerry, the Vermonters who need no last names to be identified.

Obama also has more campaign offices in the state (four to Clinton's two as of Tuesday), more paid staff (ten to eight), more money in the bank, and, it seems, more enthusiasm.

Whatever Hillary Clinton's flaws may be, though, a shortage of tenacity is not among them. The other day her campaign announced a "seasoned team of lifelong Vermonters and campaign veterans to lead its efforts in the Green Mountain State."

Well, some of them are lifelong Vermonters, one lives in New Hampshire, and one grew up in Little Rock. They are Hillary Clinton professionals more than they are Vermonters, but that's not unusual.

Despite being the smallest of the four states voting on March 4, Vermont could affect the outcome, but only if Clinton wins Texas or Ohio. Should she lose both of them, the race will be effectively over; Obama will have a large lead in delegates and he will have emerged as the obvious choice of most Democratic voters.

But if Clinton wins both, or even wins one and loses the other very narrowly, the delegate count gets closer and the Obama "momentum" will evaporate. In that case, the semi-official national chatterers will probably pay some attention to Vermont, at least looking to see if Clinton also came closer here than the polls had predicted.

None of this is impossible. The latest polls indicate something close to a tie in Texas, a narrow Clinton lead in Ohio, a larger one in Rhode Island. That's why it isn't a fool's errand for her supporters to try to close the gap in Vermont.

Feb 21: Bombshell

This post was going to be about how the presidential campaign has actually come to Vermont.

There on our television screens are at least two Barack Obama advertisements and one 30-second spot from Hillary Clinton. Both candidates have paid staff in the Green Mountain State. We're important.

But that will have to wait. Thursday morning, the 2008 presidential campaign saw its first bombshell, thanks to a New York Times report about Republican nominee-presumptive John McCain's connection with a lobbyist.

The lobbyist represented companies whose business could be helped or hurt by decisions made in the Senate Commerce Committee, which McCain then chaired. The lobbyist was also a comely woman in her early 30s in 1999, when, according to the Times, some McCain aides thought she and the senator had a romantic relationship. According to the news story, some of those aides confronted McCain directly, warning him of the political dangers in the relationship.

In a news conference Thursday morning, McCain denied any such confrontation, called the story "untrue," and said he and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, had never had a romantic relationship. McCain's supporters accused the Times of deliberately trying to damage McCain's candidacy.

But the Times editorial page endorsed McCain over the other Republican candidates before the New York primary earlier this month. Furthermore, the newspaper was reportedly on the verge of running the story as early as December, when it would have been far more damaging to McCain's candidacy. As would holding the story until October.

Perhaps the Times ran the story now because the New Republic magazine was about to publish an account of why the newspaper had not published it earlier. In a statement, the New Republic acknowledged that one of its correspondents was "working on a piece about the Times' foot-dragging on the McCain story, and the back-and-forth within the paper about whether to publish it."

As McCain noted, the story is based on the allegations of un-named former staffers, some of whom acknowledge that they have become "disillusioned" with the senator. Furthermore, the news article never alleges that McCain tilted the decisions of the Commerce Committee in ways that would have benefited Iseman's clients.

But it does report that McCain sometimes flew to and from political events in the corporate jets of those clients, even as he was cultivating a reputation as a senator who was independent of lobbyists and "special interests" in Washington. These revelations, more than the suggestions of personal misbehavior, could damage McCain politically.

Republicans were quick to claim that the story would end up helping McCain because to conservatives, many of whom still regard him warily, the New York Times is the enemy, and the front-page account would inspire conservatives to rally around him.

Maybe, or maybe not. Nobody has taken a poll about how voters might be reacting (probably not much at all, yet), and nobody knows what else the Times and other newspapers might be publishing in the next few days.

Stay tuned.

Feb. 20: The Big Mo

So perhaps there is momentum after all.

It wasn't just that Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin Primary Tuesday. It isn't even just that he whumped her but good. By any standards, a 58-41 percent margin is a wipeout, and no one wins that big without getting votes from almost everywhere and everyone.

Obama did. He won, according to the exit polls, among women, white men, voters whose household income is below $50,000 a year, and union members. Those were supposed to be the Hillary Clinton voters.

But wait. It gets worse than that for Clinton. The latest polling out of Texas and Ohio—the now more than ever "must win" states for Clinton—shows that her leads over Obama in both states have shrunk to just about nothing. And these polls were taken before those Wisconsin results came in.

So far this year, there hasn't been much momentum, at least on the Democratic side. For the first few weeks, it almost seemed as if voters in each state were determined to resist being "momentisized" (a word I just made up), as if they were saying, "We're not influenced by what happened last week someplace else."

But the reality is that we are all influenced by everything that happens around us. Sometimes the result of that influence is a backlash against what has just happened, and the Clinton campaign can hope that Texans and Ohioans react that way. For the moment, though, it seems just as likely that the Obama wave will wash over these states, too.

If it does, one can forget all the delegate math being analyzed in excruciating detail by the various pundits. If Obama, now the winner of ten consecutive contests, wins those two states March 4, chemistry will trump arithmetic and he will be the nominee.

If so, Vermont's March 4 primary could end up being somewhat less important than some local politicians and commentators have been hoping and predicting. Only if "every delegate counts" does it matter which candidate Vermont's 23 delegates prefer. An Obama sweep of the big states voting that day would effectively end the contest.

Remember, though, that in both physics and politics, momentum can be reversed. Clinton's problem is that she hasn't found a way to reverse Obama's lately. Attacking him for lack of experience or scorning him for making good speeches hasn't worked. Neither did the rather weak allegation of "plagiarism" based on the fact that Obama used a few phrases borrowed from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

Don't expect her to give up without a fight, though. She'll try something else, perhaps inspired by Michelle Obama's impolitic remark that " for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country."

On the other hand, trying to tarnish Obama's image might be less productive for her than trying to enhance her own.

Meanwhile, there seemed little doubt that John McCain, once again the big Republican winner Tuesday, assumes that he will be running against Obama in the general election. McCain did not mention Obama's name, but his victory speech warning against "the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate" and being "deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history" could have referred to no one else.

McCain's victory was big, but apparently not big enough to convince Gov. Mike Huckabee to quit. On the Republican side, though, there is no doubt that McCain will be the party's nominee. For the Democrats, there is some doubt, but less every day.

Feb. 13: What Just Happened

Ask the average reader/viewer/listener/voter what are the sins of political journalism and he/she is most likely to reply either that the reporters "only want to sell papers" (or, in the electronic realm, boost ratings) or that they are "ideologically biased" from either the right or the left, invariably whichever direction is the opposite of the reader/viewer/listener who's been asked.

Wrong on both counts. First of all, what is in the paper is not what sells it. Whether the newskid gets the paper to your front door at a regular hour and dry enough to read is what sells it. Similarly, what precedes the network news show determines its ratings more than any report on the show.

No, the two great sins of political journalism are (1) Hyping a story, meaning making much of little to try to get the story on the front page or the top of the news show; and (2) Exaggerating the importance of whatever just happened.

There are examples of both these days, but for now, let's stick with that second one because it is rampant.

Yes, Barack Obama has now won eight (count 'em, 8) straight primaries. He is ahead of Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates. He is also ahead in the polls in the two states that vote next week, Hawaii and Wisconsin. Clinton has fired her campaign manager and some other senior staffers. So she is said to be panicking while he is now the frontrunner. He has "momentum."

Well, sort of. Calling him the frontrunner is plausible. Asserting his momentum is dicey. Wasn't he supposed to have momentum after he won Iowa last month? Wasn't she supposed to have it after she surprised everyone by winning New Hampshire five days later? Momentum has been hard to sustain this year.

Not to mention that he's only a few points ahead in Wisconsin, where Clinton might still win. And she is the favorite in three states that vote on March 4—Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island.

(Yes, there's another state voting that day—our very own; nobody's polled it of late).

So, whoosh! Momentum, whatever that may be, could switch right back the other way in just a few weeks. And there's a ways to go. Another big primary—Pennsylvania's—doesn't happen until April 22. Right now, Clinton looks strong there. Obama is on a roll of sorts. The exit polling from the Virginia, Maryland and District of Columbia primaries Tuesday indicted that he's making progress in getting the votes of white, males, and less affluent voters. But whatever else Hillary Clinton may be, she is tenacious. This thing ain't over.

Well, not on the Democratic side. John McCain is going to be the Republican nominee. Mike Huckabee came pretty close in Virginia, but under the Republican rules, pretty close got him no delegates. For many reasons, not the least of which is that he seems to be having a wonderful time, Huckabee will stay in the race. He may even have a specific political goal in mind. If that goal is the vice presidential nomination he is likely to be disappointed, but who knows?

But Ron Paul, in case you didn't notice, is really no longer in the race. Dr. Paul has not formally quit, but he has acknowledged that he'd best tend to his district, where he faces opposition in the Republican primary. Knowing that he cannot be nominated for president, he'll concentrate on getting re-nominated as Congressman. Democrat Dennis Kucinich made the same decision a few weeks ago. Even candidates, it seems, can face reality.

Sometimes.

Feb. 8: No Choice

Sorry Vermont Republicans, but you have no choice.

Well, that doesn't apply to the Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul fans in the state. But they seem to be a small if eager band. (No, there have been no polls; but relatively few Vermonters fit the profile of the typical Huckabee voter, and Paul remains firmly on the fringe).

Not that Mitt Romney was likely to have prevailed in the March 4 primary here anyway. John McCain took the state in 2000 and would probably have done so again had Romney stayed in the race. Still, as a neighbor, Romney might have gotten a decent share of the vote.

We'll never know. To the surprise of most—including his audience at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference—Romney said he was “suspending" his campaign. That means he keeps the delegates he has won, though it's unclear what he can do with them.

Romney's stated reason for his withdrawal—that staying in the race would make a Democratic victory more likely and that I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding the surrender to terror"—need not be taken seriously. He also left little doubt that he might run again one day, at least implying that he assumes (hopes?) McCain will lose in November. Romney praised McCain, but notably did not endorse him.

Just as notably, McCain drew as many boos as cheers when he addressed the same group later in the day. The senator from Arizona remains unwelcome and distrusted by some conservatives.

Meanwhile, the Democratic race goes on, a closely fought contest with Hillary Clinton slightly ahead of Barack Obama in the delegate count. The conventional wisdom in Washington holds that this bodes ill for the Democrats, who will continue to fight while the Republicans unite around their presumptive nominee.

Maybe. But this is not like 1972 when the Democratic Party was split asunder over the Vietnam war and the length of men's hair. Nor is it like 1980 when incumbent President Jimmy Carter was challenged by Sen. Edward Kennedy and Democrats chose sides based on ideology. This fight is between two candidates who disagree on very little. The dilemma facing most Democratic voters is that they like both candidates, and would happily vote for either one in November.

This year, the ideological unhappiness is on the other side of the spectrum.

Feb. 6: Wrong Again

We were supposed to know by now.

Isn't that what all the experts said? (And, yes, now that you mention it, I was one of those experts).

For months, if not a year, the conventional wisdom was that after this week's "Tsunami Tuesday" primaries and caucuses, the presidential nomination contests in both parties would be effectively, if not officially, over.

They aren't.

For a week, the smart money said that Sen. John McCain would sweep the board on the Republican side, perhaps even winning enough delegates to assure his nomination.

Not quite. McCain did well. He won nine states including all the big ones—California, New York, New Jersey—and most of the delegates. Depending on who is doing the counting, he has either almost half or slightly more than half of the 1,191 delegates he needs to win the nomination. He is surely the front-runner, and perhaps the presumptive nominee.

But he swept no board. Mike Huckabee won five Southern states, staying viable as a factor (a complication?) in the Republican contest, if not as a potential nominee.

The big loser of the night was Mitt Romney. He won more states (6) than Huckabee, but except for his Massachusetts home , Minnesota, and Colorado they were small states with few delegates. Romney pledged to fight on, but there were rumblings among his senior campaign officials about the need for "soul-searching." As long as Huckabee stays in the race—and after Tuesday, why shouldn't he?—Romney's chances of going one-on-one against McCain seem low.

But there were some ominous signs for McCain in Tuesday's results. He didn't win a majority of the votes in California, or even in his home state of Arizona. The exit polls indicated that he remains weak among the most conservative voters. And in general Republican turnout was far lower than the Democratic. Even in Alabama, a safely Republican seat for the last two decades, 100,000 more Democrats than Republicans turned out to vote.

But at least the Republicans had a clear winner Tuesday. The Democrats did not. Barack Obama won more states but Hillary Clinton won all the big ones except Obama's Illinois home. She got the support of far more voters, and apparently won a few more delegates, though her total lead over Obama is small. The Democratic result was not exactly a tie. Clinton was the bigger winner. But not by much.

Clinton won California because she outpolled Obama among Hispanic voters by a two-to-one majority, and she carried most of the Northeast (except Connecticut) by winning big among Democrats whose household income is less than $50,000 a year. Unless Obama can do better among these voters, he's going to have a problem.

But he has some breathing room. The next few contests are in states that lean Obama-ish: This Saturday there are primaries in Louisiana and caucuses in Nebraska and Washington State. The next day, Maine Democrats hold their caucuses. Next Tuesday there are primaries in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. On February 19, Hawaii and Wisconsin vote.

That's all for February, and at least the Democratic race will not be settled when the month ends. All of which makes March 4 loom large. On that date, there are primaries in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and... yes, Vermont. And since every delegate will count, they will all be important.

Jan. 30: Now There Are Four

Now there are four. Two Democrats and two Republicans still running for president.

OK, technically there are three Republicans. But nobody (probably including himself) thinks Mike Huckabee is going to win the nomination. Not after finishing fourth in the Florida primary.

This reality does not render his continued candidacy pointless. Its point now is that it helps John McCain, who has just become what no other Republican has been so far—the real front-runner. Because he appeals mostly to social conservatives, Huckabee eats into Mitt Romney's support, benefiting McCain as the two of them fight it out in the 22 states that hold their primaries and caucuses February 5.

It might be too cynical to suggest that Huckabee is staying in the race deliberately to help McCain, hoping that McCain then chooses him as his running mate. Therefore, no such suggestion will be made here, where cynicism is rejected.

The conventional wisdom right now is that it will be hard to stop McCain, who is ahead in the polls in most of the big Feb. 5 states, which include California, New York, New Jersey, and his Arizona home. Because delegates in these primaries are usually awarded on a ‘winner-take-all' basis (either by state or by Congressional District) a candidate need win only a plurality to pile up bucket-loads of delegates.

In this case, it's hard to see how the conventional wisdom can be wrong, especially with Florida loser Rudy Giuliani dropping out to endorse McCain. But remember that just a few months ago the conventional wisdom held that Giuliani was the most likely Republican nominee. He was ahead in the polls, too.

As it turned out, though, he wasn't a very good candidate. His self-proclaimed toughness sometimes came across as arrogance if not nastiness. He talked more about what he had done in New York than what he would do as president. In front of an audience, he did not connect with voters.

McCain will not have that problem. He's a veteran campaigner and an effective one. Romney may have more money to spend (much of it his own) but McCain's decisive Florida victory should help him raise enough to be competitive this week. It will be quite a week.

On the Democratic side, John Edwards did not endorse either of his opponents as he dropped out, but his campaign aides said he might do so any day. Whether he endorses probably makes little difference because his supporters won't necessarily follow his lead. But what they do could decide whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama gets nominated.

Edwards did best among white males, especially anti-establishment white males. So far this primary season, whites have mostly voted for Clinton, but the angrier, more anti-establishment, voters have preferred Obama. How this will break down is anybody's guess.

Jan. 27: Two Wins for Obama

If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, the events of this past weekend will have been pivotal, perhaps less for the primary he won than for the endorsement he got.

That's unusual because in general winning primaries, as Obama did Saturday in South Carolina , is important, while endorsements are much ado about little. A candidate who wins a primary gets convention delegates and perhaps "momentum" into the next primary. A candidate winning the endorsement of, say, a U.S. Senator, can be reasonably confident of getting the vote of that senator, and—maybe—the senator's spouse. Nothing more.

But the endorsement Obama got in Sunday's New York Times did not come from a senator. It came from a private citizen named Caroline Kennedy, and the headline over her refreshingly brief essay (Kennedys can write, you know) was dynamite: "A President Like My Father."

The impact here is less directly political than mythical, as is John F. Kennedy's place in our culture. Even among that majority not yet born when he was killed there is a sense that he embodied a kind of hope and optimism never quite rekindled since.

Kennedy was no more a perfect person than anyone else, and he was surely an ambitious, shrewd, and (when necessary) conniving politician. But he could also, as his daughter wrote, make people "feel inspired and hopeful about America."

It is useful in this context to compare Kennedy's impact to that of Ronald Reagan, the ex-president Republicans look to as a model. Both inspired optimism and confidence, with this small but vital difference: Reagan made Americans feel they could better themselves; Kennedy made them feel they could transcend themselves.

What might be important to the politics of 2008 is that the Reagan message remains the only one we have heard from our leaders since the early 1980s. That means the leaders of both parties. Bill Clinton, himself a child of the Kennedy years, tried to restate JFK's message from time to time in his rhetoric, but he was overwhelmed by his opponents, by his mistakes, and by a political culture that resisted even thinking about anything beyond national security and material wealth.

Obama's candidacy is based on the assumption—or at least the hope—that the culture is ripe for change in this regard, that while of course people want to prosper and be safe, they want something more. The psychologists tell us we all want to be part of something greater than ourselves, but only a skilled politician can persuade most people to vote for that vision, because it usually means taking a chance.

Obama, the youngest serious presidential candidate since the 1960s, is challenging the voters to take a chance. As did Kennedy.

No doubt the Obama campaign is skilled enough to have made several million copies of Caroline Kennedy's article. Whether he can parlay its sentiments and his big win in South Carolina to victories in the February 5 primaries remains uncertain.

But even 44 years after John F. Kennedy's death, it doesn't hurt a campaign when his only surviving child says, "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president—not just for me, for a new generation of Americans."

As endorsements go, this one could have legs.

Jan. 20: Steps Along the Way

There was no turn in the political road from Saturday's voting in Nevada and South Carolina, but at least there was a little movement along the way, providing a touch of clarity and teaching (again) an old lesson.

The clarity is that both parties now have front-runners, each with a tenuous hold on that position. Neither Hillary Clinton nor John McCain is very far in front, but for now both of them are in front.

"For now" may last only a few days. Barack Obama is ahead of Clinton in the polling for the South Carolina Democratic Primary next Saturday (the two parties hold their primaries on different days down there), and McCain faces tough challenges from Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and perhaps Rudy Giuliani in Florida the following Tuesday.

Examining the entrails of the South Carolina exit polls, some analysts saw trouble ahead for McCain. He won by getting 42 percent of the independents, to Huckabee's 25 percent. Self-identified Republicans split their votes evenly between the two.

But only registered Republicans are allowed to vote in Republican primaries in several of the big states holding primaries February 5. McCain might well be outspent in those states by Romney, the Republican winner in Nevada.

On the other hand, those states are full of Republican moderates, among whom McCain also did well.

The old lesson re-learned is that people tend to vote for one of their own. Romney probably would have won Nevada without the support of his fellow-Mormons, but according to the polling (entrance, not exit, polls in caucuses) they made up about a quarter of the Republican caucus-goers there, and he got almost all of them, transforming a mere victory into a route.

In the Democratic contest there, Obama won the support of an overwhelming 83 percent of the black caucus-goers, but only 34 percent of the whites, and, more significantly, only 26 percent of the Hispanics.

In South Carolina, perhaps half the Democratic primary voters will be African-American. But in those February 5 states—including California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois—black voters will be substantially outnumbered by whites and Hispanics. If Obama is to win, he will have to do better with these voters.

That might not be easy. The continuing tension between African-Americans and Hispanics tends to be ignored, but should come as no surprise. In both communities, millions of people vie for the same low-paying jobs, so no wonder some in each community see the other as competitors, not allies.

Obama acknowledged as much in his Martin Luther King Day speech at King's old church in Atlanta Sunday.

"For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity," he told the largely black audience.

Conversely some of those immigrants, legal and otherwise, see African-Americans as their competitors for jobs.

For Democrats of any ethnicity, the worry is that if Clinton wins the nomination some black voters might stay home on Election Day in anger that one of their own did not get the prize. Or that many Hispanics, another part of the Democratic coalition, might be disinclined to vote for any African-American.

Jan. 16: Befuddled Republicans, Petulant Democrats

How About those wild and crazy Republicans?

Three contests, three winners. First Mike Huckabee, then John McCain, now—just in the nick of time—Mitt Romney.

By coming from behind to whip McCain in the Michigan Primary on Tuesday, Romney not only revived his all-but-dead candidacy; he also tarnished that glow that had surrounded McCain for an entire week (as good as it gets for Republicans this year) since he did his own come-from-behind trick to beat Romney in New Hampshire.

For a few days, at any rate, "The Mac is Back" is out. "Mitt-mentum" is in.

Three full days, actually. The South Carolina Republican Primary is this Saturday, and the winner could be any of the three gentlemen named above.

Or none of them. Fred Thompson is in this race, too, and he's from Tennessee, which fails to qualify as a neighbor of South Carolina only because a sliver of North Carolina sneaks down to separate them. But he's from nearby.

Waiting—not in the wings but even farther to the South—is former front-runner Rudy Giuliani, pinning his fading hopes on winning the January 29 Florida Primary.

For the moment, though, there is no Republican front-runner, less because the party suffers from an embarrassment of riches than a richness of embarrassment. All the contenders are flawed and none has excited a plurality, much less a majority, of the GOP rank and file. In Michigan, for instance, less than ten percent of the eligible electorate voted in the Republican Primary.

But as usual, the Republicans have one thing going for them: the Democrats, who spent most of the last few days engaged in unseemly bickering.

On the air and in print, the subject of this squabble was invariably described as "race."

Not really. It wasn't as though the candidates differed over affirmative action policy. In fact, they really didn't differ over anything. They and their supporters just kept taking a lot of umbrage. And while it was true that the remark that sparked the initial umbrage-taking had to do with the history of the civil rights movement, what ensued was less a debate about race than a display of mutual petulance.

By Tuesday night, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama debated in Nevada, they seem to have understood how childish they had been. So they stopped.

John Edwards was in that debate, too. (Dennis Kucinich was not, though by now that point is politically moot), and the three of them seem all but tied in the polls preceding their next contest—the Nevada Caucus this Saturday.

Yes, the Republicans will caucus there Saturday also, over-shadowed by their vote in South Carolina, where Democrats vote on January 26.

The two parties do not arrange their schedules in order to confuse us; it just sometimes seems that way.

Jan. 9: New Hampshire Does It Again

Aren't New Hampshire Primary voters fun?

They keep refusing to do what the experts have told them they are going to do.

They did it again Tuesday, at least on the Democratic side, and so we head into the rest of the primary season with open contests in both parties.

Somewhat less open for the Democrats. John Edwards has vowed to stay in the race, but beyond the mandatory "anything can happen" caveat, it's hard to see where or how he can win a primary against his party's two front-running celebrities.

After Sen. Hillary Clinton's win in New Hampshire, though, she and Sen. Barack Obama are equally front-running. Their next contest is the January 19 caucus in Nevada, where two influential labor unions are supporting Obama.

If the Democrats have two front-runners, the Republicans have none. Sen. John McCain's impressive victory in New Hampshire gives him momentum. Less certain is whether it will give him enough money to have much chance to win the next test on January 19 in South Carolina, where Iowa winner Mike Huckabee is ahead in the latest polls.

Mitt Romney, now a two-time loser in states he expected to win, will be there, too. Rudy Giuliani , once but no longer the nationwide front-runner in the polls, is on the ballot there, but is concentrating on Florida, which votes ten days later, but where one poll now has Giuliani running fourth.

In some ways, the big story out of New Hampshire was less who won than how so many of the pundits and pollsters go it so wrong. They all predicted a win for Obama.

Actually, the polls weren't wrong as much as they were misinterpreted, in this case over-interpreted. In a primary in which the two leading candidates have minimal policy differences, voters can change their minds easily. They did, many deciding or switching on primary day.

Why? A few likely reasons:

1—Voters didn't want this contest to end too quickly. Especially because Obama remains little-known, many voters wanted the vetting process to continue. "Let's slow this down," they seem to have said to themselves. "Let's give voters in the other states more time to look this over."

2—Many women, even some who are not wild about Clinton, may not have wanted to see an abrupt end to the hopes of the first woman with a serious chance to become president. Her much-replayed "tearing up" moment of the day before the primary could have been a factor here.

3—Obama didn't say much in the five days between his victory in the Iowa precinct caucuses and New Hampshire primary day. The elder George Bush made the same mistake in 1980. After upsetting Ronald Reagan in Iowa, Bush talked about little but the "Big Mo" he had gotten there. Similarly, Obama downplayed talking about the war and health care, instead concentrating on his message of "change," of calling for an end to the "political strategy that's been all about division and instead make it about addition."

Inspiring, yes. But also verging on the platitudinous.

4—And maybe that New Hampshire orneriness played a part. "Oh, you think we're going to do this, do you? Well then, we'll do that."

In both parties, it seems unlikely that anyone can wrap up the nomination before February 5, when 19 states, including some of the biggest, hold their primaries.

Or maybe not even then. Who knows? Could the March 4 Vermont primary, despite the tiny number of delegates at stake, have some impact after all?

Jan. 4: On to New Hampshire

The race is on, and the leaders are: Barak Obama and … no, not really Mike Huckabee. John McCain.

Huckabee may have won the Iowa Precinct Caucus vote Thursday night, but McCain was probably the bigger winner. For all sorts of reasons, the chances of Huckabee winning the Republican nomination are tiny.

But so, now, are Mitt Romney’s, who outspent Huckabee by a 20-to-1 margin in Iowa only to get beat. That helps McCain, who had caught up with Romney in the New Hampshire polls. If McCain is the big winner, Romney was the big loser in Iowa.

For the Democrats, things are somewhat more ambiguous. Obama was the big winner. Hillary Clinton, coming in third (no Clinton has ever before come in third) looks at first glance like the big loser.

But maybe John Edwards was the bigger one (we’re not even going to deal with Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, both of whom dropped out Thursday night). Edwards needed to win Iowa. He has less money than Clinton, a smaller organization on the ground in New Hampshire and elsewhere. It’s hard to see how he can win next Tuesday, or how he can stay in the race if he does not.

But the stakes for Clinton are almost as high. If Obama wins again, he will be hard to stop. Not impossible, but hard. One thing these long, grueling campaigns do is test a candidate’s tenacity and resiliency. Hillary Clinton is now put to that test.

Jan. 2: The Iowa Caucus

Thursday evening somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 Iowans (if history is any guide) will enter 3,562 rooms and quite possibly change the world.

They will caucus, these Iowans, Republicans and Democrats separately in their state's 1,781 precincts. They will gather in high school gyms and elementary school classrooms, in church basements, Kiwanis clubhouses and even in a few private homes to elect precinct officials, perhaps pass a resolution or two, and select delegates to their party's county conventions that will meet later this year.

Thus they will officially begin the process of choosing the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees.

In several ways, a caucus is not like a primary. Attending a caucus takes an entire evening, not the few minutes one spends standing in line and voting at the polling place. Not surprisingly, a smaller percentage of voters participate.

Furthermore, there is no secret ballot. Each voter declares his or her choice for president for all to see—the neighbors, your kid's third grade teacher, the parents of the kids in the third grade class that you teach, your boss, maybe even an ex-spouse. Why some Iowan has not written a novel based on the caucuses ("Murder at the Precinct Caucus") is one of the great mysteries of our time.

Here's the other peculiarity about the caucuses, one to remember while contemplating the polls that supposedly predict who is going to win. They don't.

Well, they might for the Republicans, whose process is simpler. The Republicans at each caucus just take a vote, a straw poll of the presidential preferences of all the caucus attenders. In theory then, the public opinion polls should indicate who will win.

This year the polls disagree among themselves. Sunday's Des Moines Register poll showed Mike Huckabee ahead of Mitt Romney. CNN's polling showed Romney back on top. The difference can probably be explained by different techniques for figuring out who will actually attend the caucuses.

Iowa Democrats are more complicated. Well, not as individuals. It's just their procedures that are more complicated. Under the party's rules, the presidential preferences of each precinct's county convention delegates must comprise "a fair reflection" of the presidential preferences of all the folks at the caucus.

Now, to illustrate how the final results can end up much different from the pollsters predictions, let's make up a hypothetical precinct caucus, one held in a high school gym. To keep the arithmetic simple, we'll say 100 voters attend the caucus, which gets to choose ten delegates to the county convention.

Let's say 23 of these voters are for Barack Obama, and they, as instructed by the caucus chair, stand under the basket and backboard at the north end of the gym. The 20 Hillary Clinton supporters stand under the other basket, and the 17 for John Edwards gather in the corner under the scoreboard.

The other 40 are directed elsewhere—13 for Joe Biden in front of the home-team bench, 12 for Bill Richardson near the visiting team bench, 11 for Chris Dodd in front of the runway to the locker room, and the 4 folks for Dennis Kucinich right in the middle of the gym in the circle where the jump ball starts the game.

But look at the numbers. None of these four candidates gets 15 percent of the total. What does that mean? It means they are not "viable." All their supporters get to make a second choice, joining one of the "viable" candidates or choosing one of the other "not viable" candidates thereby rendering him "viable."

This is known as the "re-alignment." The supporters of all the candidates will use all sorts of arguments to persuade the folks in the non-viable corner to come over to their side. These arguments may range from the cosmic ("our candidate is closest to yours on this key issue") to the local ("I'll convince my son who's a good ballplayer to join your little league team," though this point would probably be made sotto voce).

Let's say (this is unlikely to happen in the real world, but it helps illustrate the process) that all 40 of the voters in the "non-viable" groupings decide to back Edwards. He then ends up with 57 votes. Six of the ten delegates go to the county convention pledged to him, with Clinton and Obama each getting two delegates, even though they had more supporters than he did at the beginning.

And here's another thing: You and I will never know the results of that first count. Iowa Democrats report only the final delegate count, not the actual first choices of most caucus-goers.

Some call this undemocratic. But it's the (democratically selected) choice of the Iowans, and like it or not, that's how the process begins.

Dec. 26: Getting Petty

How sick is Rudolph Giuliani?

How "phony" is Mitt Romney?

How many former Clinton Administration foreign policy advisors now support Barack Obama, and would they all fit on the head of a pin?

Such were the questions of the presidential primary campaign as it paused—briefly—for Christmas. As it resumes, a mere week remains until the Iowa Precinct Caucuses.

Politically ailing in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Giuliani got literally sick as his campaign plane left Missouri last week, sick enough for him to order the plane back to St. Louis where he went right to a hospital.

"Flu-like symptoms," his campaign said at the time. No, said the candidate himself the next day. It was a bad head-ache. His doctor, he said, would provide more details in a few days.

All of which raised questions about both the candidate's health—Giuliani is a prostate cancer survivor—and his candor.

Meanwhile, Romney had to deal with an unusual "anti-endorsement" from one of New Hampshire's leading newspapers. The Concord Monitor hasn't endorsed anyone in either party yet, but last week it published a blistering editorial calling on the state's Republicans and Independents to reject Romney, calling him a "phony."

The policy views of the Monitor's editorial page run closer to liberal than conservative, so Republican voters might not care what it thinks. But the Monitor is a quality newspaper, and such a harsh attack is bound to do a candidate some harm.

Over on the Democratic side, Obama bragged to reporters the other day that "there are more foreign policy experts from the Clinton administration supporting me than Senator (Hillary) Clinton." Whereupon her campaign released a list of 85 ex-Clinton officials who are supporting her. The reason all this sounds like a couple of third-graders shouting, "nyaah nyah nyah nyah" at each other is that the two contenders don't disagree on much, so they have to seek out differences, no matter how petty.

Just a touch more substantive is the quarrel between Obama and John Edwards over the pro-Edwards, anti-Obama television commercials being shown in Iowa. The sponsor is not the Edwards campaign but a "527," which is the political-legal jargon for an independent committee. Obama claimed that Edwards could get the ads pulled if he really wanted to because the committee is headed by the guy who ran Edwards campaign in 2004. Edwards said he's not allowed even to make a phone call to his old buddy without endangering the committee's independence.

Obama also said Edwards was being supported by a "special interest." True, but this special interest is a labor union, not only the most general of the special interests but also one Democratic candidates annoy at their peril.

Hold on to your seats. Things should get pettier and pettier as the week rolls on.

Dec. 20: Losers Who Win

And then there were seven.

Republican presidential candidates, that is. Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo has given up. His departure will have exactly zero impact on the contest for the Republican nomination. No more than if, say, Dennis Kucinich dropped out of the Democratic race.

Which, in effect, he has. Without much fanfare, Kucinich recently filed the necessary papers for re-election to his House seat in Cleveland. He had to. A couple of locally well-known pols are challenging him in the Democratic primary, and his renomination, while likely, is not certain.

The fact is that not every presidential candidate is really running for president. Some of them, like Tancredo and Kucinich, have other goals, and here's the irony: As Tancredo officially and Kucinich effectively leave the race, they both accomplished theirs.

Tancredo ran because the other Republican candidates were not sufficiently stressing their determination to end illegal immigration. Sufficiently according to whom? Well, Tancredo, of course, but also according to millions of rank-and-file Republican voters, and a lot of Democrats too. The reticence of the other Republicans created a political opening, and Tancredo filled it. When chided about being a "one-issue candidate," he'd say, "at least I have one." And a powerful one it was. By last month's CNN "You Tube" debate in Florida, all the other Republicans were sounding as tough on immigration as Tancredo. It seemed, he said, as if they were all trying to "out-Tancredo Tancredo."

His success doomed his candidacy. With the others taking his position on his issue, who needed him?

Kucinich's success is less obvious in part because his message gets muddled thanks to his veganism and his claim to have spotted a UFO. But his basic message is opposition to the trade agreements heretofore supported by the Democratic Party establishment, including the presidential candidates.

No more. The other contenders have not gone far enough in their skepticism over "free trade" to justify any claim that they are trying to "out-Kucinich Kucinich." But all of them, including Hillary Clinton, whose husband shepherded some of those agreements through Congress, now talk of revisiting and revising them.

Like Tancredo, Kucinich was at first the lone advocate of a position scorned by the political, media, and academic elites, but endorsed by most voters, especially most Democrats. Like Tancredo, he filled a vacuum and had his impact.

At least three of the other candidates aren't really running for president, either. Republican Ron Paul represents not a single issue as Tancredo and Kucinich did, but a general point of view — anti-government libertarianism (with, in his case, some exceptions, such as his opposition to abortion rights). Like the other two, then, he represents an otherwise unrepresented constituency. It's a small one, but along with his fierce opposition to the Iraq war, it has won him an enthusiastic following.

The other two candidates who are not really running for president are Democrat Mike Gravel and Republican Duncan Hunter. What they really are running for is not clear, but every campaign must have its mysteries.

Dec. 16: Never a Dull Moment

It was a lively weekend on the primary campaign trail, with three candidates picking up key endorsements, at least one of which was a surprise.

Democrat Hillary Clinton got one of them, from the Des Moines Register, the biggest and most influential newspaper in Iowa, which begins the official nominating process in less than three weeks.

Democrat Barack Obama got another, from the Boston Globe, which sells a lot of papers in New Hampshire, where the first primary will be held just a few days later.

And Republican John McCain got three of them—one from the Register, one from the Globe, and—here was the surprise—one (officially to be announced Monday) from Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who was once so loyal a Democrat that he was the party's nominee for vice president.

Remember this about endorsements: They don't mean much, no matter how popular the endorser. Back in 1986, when Ronald Reagan had roughly a 65 percent approval rating, he went all around the country urging voters to re-elect six Republican senators who had won office on his coat-tails six years earlier. They all lost.

But these endorsements might prove a slight exception. Iowans of both parties seem genuinely uncertain about their choices. They could be seeking guidance, and it isn't unlikely that some of them will take it from the Register. Its endorsement of Edwards in 2004 helped him to his second-place finish.

If they do, Clinton, running about even with Obama in the state, is more likely to benefit than is McCain, who has but a smattering of Republican support, behind at least three of his competitors. No editorial endorsement has ever brought a candidate from five or six percent in the polls to the 20-to-30 percent needed to finish first or second.

New Hampshire is another matter. McCain is competitive there, and the Globe endorsement can't hurt. But it's the Lieberman endorsement that could complicate matters in New Hampshire.

That's because there is a very specific tactical purpose to the Lieberman support of McCain, and to announcing it now. Its purpose is to attract independent voters, who can choose on Primary day to vote in either party's contest. McCain's hope is that by demonstrating that he can appeal beyond the Republican base, he will attract more of those independents into his party's primary to support his candidacy.

If he does, he will help himself and…Clinton. That's because she is strongest in New Hampshire among true-blue Democrats, whereas Obama outpolls her with independents. So the more independents who opt for the Republican ballot on January 8, the better for both McCain and Clinton.

Politics, as you may have heard, makes strange bedfellows.

Dec. 14: Running in Place

With three weeks to go, the last Iowa debates were held this week, and, basically, nothing happened.

Good news for Iowa's new front-runners, Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrat Barack Obama. Neither man made any mistakes nor came under any fierce attacks, so nothing slowed their apparent momentum.

But then it wasn't such bad news for the former front-runners now running second in the Iowa polling, Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Hillary Clinton. They both acquitted themselves well, perhaps reminding some Iowa caucus-goers why they had preferred them just a few weeks ago. John Edwards was at his best, too, perhaps reminding some Iowa Democrats why they preferred him a few months ago.

One reason neither debate elicited any squabbling was that the moderator, the editor of the Des Moines Register, took some of the more controversial issues off the table at the outset, and held the candidates to very short answers.

The Register, Iowa's largest and most influential newspaper, sponsored both debates along with Iowa Public Television, and the most significant result of the two forums may be learned Sunday morning when the Register is expected to make editorial endorsements in both races.

In presidential politics, newspaper endorsements are usually worth the paper on which they are printed, at best. This could be an exception. Iowans of both parties seem genuinely uncertain about their choices this year. That's because Republican voters appear unimpressed by any of their contenders, and, with one exception, the Democrats barely disagree on any major issue.

The one exception, Dennis Kucinich, was not invited to Thursday's debate, an odd decision considering that the sponsors did include Republican Alan Keyes, even more marginal and less reasonable than Kucinich.

So the voters there seem to be seeking guidance, and it isn't unlikely that some of them will take it from the Register. Its endorsement of Edwards in 2004 helped him to his second-place finish.

If there were any "winners," it might have been the Democratic "other guys"—Bill Richardson, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd. They got more time than they did in most of the earlier debates, and they used it well. "The second tier beat the first tier," said Dave Nagle a former congressman and Iowa Democratic State Chairman.

Unfortunately for the second tier, most Democratic voters seem more than satisfied with at least one of their first tier—Obama, Clinton, and Edwards, providing little incentive for those voters to look any farther, as Republican voters did when they elevated Huckabee into their first tier, which had been Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain.

Richardson tried the anti-establishment pitch. "What I like best about Iowans is that you like underdogs," he said. "And you like to shake things up. You don't like the national media and the smarty-pants set telling you who's going to be the next president."

If that doesn't work, nothing will. It probably won't work, but three weeks is a long time in politics.

December 12

New polls are out this week, confirming some—but not all—of the conventional wisdom about the presidential campaign.

All three polls (CNN, Washington Post-ABC News, New York Times-CBS News) agree that in both parties the race for the presidential nomination is getting tighter, and that Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Hillary Clinton have lost their leads in Iowa to Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama.

Obama has almost caught up with Clinton in New Hampshire, too—one poll had her up by just one point, an effective tie—but on the Republican side Romney remains strong in the Granite State, and Huckabee is running a weak fourth.

There’s no mystery about why Huckabee does so much better in Iowa, where the January 3 precinct caucuses will begin the official nominating procedure. Something like a third of Iowa’s registered Republicans describe themselves as Evangelical Christians, as is Huckabee, a Baptist minister before he became governor of Arkansas. In more secular—and more Roman Catholic—New Hampshire, where the first primary will be held five days later, the Evangelical percentage is far lower.

Still, Romney, who now trails both long-time front-runner Rudy Giuliani and Huckabee in national polling, needs to win Iowa. So he has gone on the offensive, becoming the first Republican to "go negative" in a television commercial pointing out that "Mike Huckabee supported in-state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants (and) taxpayer-funded scholarships for illegal aliens."

The latest polls also show that while most Democratic voters are satisfied with their party’s candidates, Republicans are not. That explains why the Republican race is so fluid, and why nominal front-runner Giuliani leads with a mere 22 percent.

One sort-of surprise in the polling is that the Iraq war remains very important and very unpopular. With the number of US combat deaths down in recent month and relatively less sectarian violence in Iraq (though 40 people were reported killed in southern Iraq Wednesday morning) some commentators had speculated that the war was becoming less important as a political issue.

Apparently not. Substantial majorities think the war was a mistake, want to get out of Iraq within the next year or so, and rate the war as either the most or second most important issue facing the country. Its only rival is the economy, about which voters are more pessimistic.

All in all, the folks are in a foul mood. Not even a third of them approve of the way President Bush is doing his job, even fewer give Congress high marks, and some three quarters think the country is headed down the wrong track.

December 9

For the moment, the two most powerful names in the presidential nominating campaigns are Oprah Winfrey and Wayne DuMond.

The first of whom needs scant introduction. Hers has been a well-known name for quite a while. But not until the other day did she insert herself into presidential politics, campaigning for her fellow Chicagoan, Sen. Barack Obama, in the early decision states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

And DuMond? He's the convicted rapist whose parole was supported by then-Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas in 1996. DuMond was freed and moved to Missouri, where he murdered a woman. He died in prison in 2005.

Old news, but now that Huckabee is leading in the Iowa polls 25 days before the precinct caucuses there begin the nominating process, his past actions inevitably have come under greater scrutiny.

Just what either Winfrey's or DuMond's ultimate political impact will be remains uncertain. She is not merely the queen of daytime TV, but such a cultural icon that use of her last name is superfluous. The imprimatur of "Oprah" is enough to fill an auditorium or transform a book into a best seller.

But so far, no celebrity has ever elected a president or selected a party's nominee. Usually, they do little more than help warm up an audience before the candidate speaks, which is what Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling was doing for Sen. John McCain in New Hampshire the other day. Nobody thinks Schilling swings any votes.

Probably, neither does Oprah, directly. But she is so influential with so many women, that she might convince many of them to consider Obama. Then it will be up to him to make the sale.

As for the possibility that DuMond and his victims will politically haunt Huckabee from their graves, that depends on whether voters—especially the many religiously motivated conservatives among Iowa's Republicans—react to his insistence that he did not pressure the parole board to let the man out of jail. Some of the parole board members insist that he did. He says he was moved by DuMond's clean prison record and by reports that he had undergone a religious conversion while in prison.

But Huckabee was also being pressured by conservative allies who were convinced that DuMond was innocent and had been ill-treated because his victim was a distant relative of the then-governor, none other than Bill Clinton.

All in all, a story for an Oprah Winfrey show.

December 4

As of today, there are 30 days to go until the first actual, official, for-real votes are cast in the Iowa precinct caucuses, and ... waddaya know! Both races are getting interesting.

The two nationwide front-runners, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani, are still ahead, but by less than they were a few weeks ago. In Iowa, early front-runners Clinton and Mitt Romney, are either tied, or even slightly behind, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee.

No one should be surprised. Those early polls weren't wrong, they just measured preferences very lightly held. Most voters weren't paying close attention to the presidential campaign. Now more of them are paying attention, and some of them are changing their minds.

No surprise there, either. Especially among the Democrats, each party's candidates don't much differ with one another. Almost any Democratic voter would happily vote for any of the party's leading candidates.

The Republican situation is slightly more complicated, with Giuliani more liberal on social issues than his opponents. For months, many conservative voters have overlooked his apostasy because they believed he might be their party's strongest contender next November. Now some of them are wondering about that.

What should be expected in the next 30 days? More surprises.