Conventional wisdom says next year's presidential race should be Clinton v Giuliani. But this time all bets are off

This time next year we'll finally know. True, even then we will still be stuck with two-and-a-half more months of George W Bush whiling away his final days as America's 43rd president and military commander-in-chief with the most formidable arsenal of WMD the world has ever known still at his disposal. Dick Cheney, who revealed his dumbfounding grasp of world affairs this month, when he told a Dallas audience that "the people of Peru deserve better" than to have Hugo Chávez as their leader, will doubtless still be urging Bush to unleash a WMD or two - at Iran, Iraq, who cares, as long as it demonstrates his manhood? - right up until that magic moment when noon strikes on 20 January 2009, and the 44th president takes charge.

But suddenly, the end of one of the country's most disastrous presidencies no longer seems a distant dream. In less than three months' time, when roughly half the country will have held its primary elections and caucuses, we will almost certainly know which two people will have emerged as the Democratic and Republican candidates for that 44th presidency as the nation's voters go to the polls next 4 November.

This reality seems to have sunk in, just in the past few days. Instead of polite platitudes, the 16 main candidates are suddenly exchanging gunfire - and blood is being drawn unprecedentedly early for a presidential election campaign. Vic ious whispering campaigns - that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian, for example - have started. Senators and former senators pride themselves on being a collegiate bunch even when they're political rivals, but on the Democratic side alone the only three candidates with a chance - Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and ex-senator John Edwards - privately make it clear that they have nothing but contempt for each other.

You know an American presidential election campaign is truly under way, though, when one of the leading candidates pops out of a mask to introduce Saturday Night Live - as Obama did last weekend. No fewer than 15 of the 16 candidates have stupendously boring, self-promoting books out in the shops; Obama has already produced two. Hillary Clinton has 25 offices in little Iowa alone, while Obama is currently out-doing her with 33. Slick admen and women are producing instant, web-only campaign ads that are now a routine weapon in American elections: Edwards drew real blood last Monday when his team brought out a clever one depicting Mrs Clinton as a disingenuous flip-flopper, which spread like wildfire through cyberspace.

I would like, at this stage, to predict the outcome confidently and tell NS readers who will take the oath of office on 20 January 2009. I stuck my neck out more than two years ago by forecasting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, thus standing as good a chance as any to become the next president, and I am prepared to stick with this prediction as being as good as any - which, as I will explain, is not saying that much.

I wrote last August that an obscure Law & Order actor and former senator called Fred Thompson would emerge as a major force for the Republicans, believing that he was sufficiently vacuous for the right to project on to him whatever presidential image they currently sought, which he would then obligingly provide. That is exactly what has happened, and Thompson is now second only to Rudy Giuliani in the nationwide Republican polls; so far, though, his performances have been distinctly underwhelming.

Chaos in the caucuses

But America is in a feverishly labile mood. The Democrats and Republicans now have no choice but to venture into the unknown by redefining and rebranding themselves for the post-Bush reconstruction era. An ABC news poll found not only that 74 per cent of Americans think the nation is on "the wrong track", but that 69 per cent believe a recession is looming. Throw in the fact that this is the first presidential election since 1928 to start with no incumbent president or vice-president running, and you soon realise that we are facing a uniquely volatile mix of ingredients that makes conventional polling and electoral predictors even less reliable than usual.

Taking current polls at face value, for example, it is what Americans like to call a "no-brainer" that the election will be Clinton v Giuliani - and that Clinton will win. The polls are unanimous on this. Conventional wisdom also states that the candidate who has raised the most campaign funds will win his party's nomination, as happened in 11 of the past 12 presidential elections (the exception being Howard Dean in 2004).

That predictor presents us with another clear no-brainer. More than a third of the Republican fat cats who put Bush into the White House have yet to put a dime into the Republican coffers for next year's election, and the non-partisan Centre for Responsive Politics reports that the Democrats have received at least 54 per cent of all political donations this year. Individually, Clinton is way ahead of the pack, too. In the third quarter of 2007, she raised $27.9m while Giuliani managed only a paltry $11.6m - less, even, than Republican rivals like Thompson ($12.8m) or the ex- Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney ($18.4m).

The former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, seen as a rank outsider, scraped in with just over a $1m. An amalgamation of the major polls last Tuesday, meanwhile, had Giuliani romping 11.7 points ahead of Thompson and leaving Romney and Huckabee lagging even further behind. Yet - and here I really am going out on a limb again - I believe that either Romney or Huckabee are actually more likely to win the Republican nomination than poor old Rudy. I'm not the only one, either: Charlie Cook, a tubby Washington sage who has been producing his own insider political newsletter for centuries, says he is more likely to win the Tour de France than Giuliani is to ever get the Republican nomination.

Confused? That is the point I am trying to make: the political volatility and unique set of circumstances is such that, certainly on the Republican side, nobody can safely be considered a frontrunner - whatever the polls or account ledgers suggest. Perhaps Hillary Clinton is the only candidate from either party who can reasonably have high expectations: "It will take a perfect campaign from Edwards or Obama to beat her, and neither is running a perfect campaign," a friend who is a very senior Democratic apparatchik and seasoned Clintonista tells me. "Only Hillary can beat Hillary now."

Indeed. Though Senator Clinton is the most sure-footed and self-disciplined politician on either side, she has just endured the worst week of her political career. She put in a poor (albeit not disastrous) performance in the last televised debate between the Democratic candidates, enabling both Obama and Edwards - each far more ruthless than they seem - to go for her jugular. She duly started slipping in the polls, but still has a long way to fall before she needs to be really worried.

The final destabilising and perhaps most critical component of the 2008 presidential election is the endearingly chaotic and irrational system of primaries and caucuses, now threatening to get out of hand. It has long been an American political quirk that Iowa should hold the first caucuses and New Hampshire the first primaries, giving both states a brief spotlight every four years and a political importance neither merits; New Hampshire even has its own law which mandates that it will hold its primary at least a week before any other state.

The vastly more politically vital state of Florida, with 27 electoral college seats compared to Iowa's seven and New Hampshire's four, has finally rebelled against this tradition and unilaterally declared it will go to the polls on 29 January - the week immediately after New Hampshire, which is so rattled that it is now threatening to bring forward its primary to as early as next month. Other states are rushing to bring forward their primaries too, with the result that next 5 February (as the date falls in 2008) will no longer be known as Super Tuesday, but is already being tastelessly referred to as Tsunami Tuesday. More than 20 states will go to the polls, including mighty California (55 seats) and New York (31); hence it is all but certain that we will then know who the candidates will be.

This unparalleled confusion has required major rethinks of traditional electoral strategies, and some of the Republicans have been smarter than others in anticipating this. Winning those early states like Iowa and New Hampshire may be statistically insignificant in itself, but can endow the status of winner and frontrunner on the victor in the minds of the electorate - a priceless acquisition.

The candidate who saw all this coming, and has thus had the most shrewd strategy by far, is Romney - and state polls (much more reliable pointers in American politics than nationwide ones) came out last Monday showing that he is within a whisker of taking the first four states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and South Carolina. He has spent $53.6m in the build-up and has 36.2 per cent of the vote in Iowa, meaning that he has spent $1.48m on every percentage point of support there; Giuliani has spent $30.6m but has only 13.1 per cent share of the vote; last but by no means least, Huckabee has spent just $1.7m but has garnered 12.8 per cent of the vote in doing so.

Psychologically, therefore, Romney might well be perceived as the winner even before Florida casts its hanging chads on 29 January and is then followed by the massive wave of states a week later. The problem staring the Republicans in the face, though, is that all their leading candidates are flawed in some major way. Giuliani's political apostasy will surely soon catch up with him, for example, once Bible-belt Republicans perceive he is (or was) a pro-abortion and pro-gay rights rough diamond with a messy personal life (three marriages, estranged children) and a suspect business past, rather than the heroic saviour of us all from 9/11.

The stealth candidate

Thompson's stunning vacuousness could yet prove to be a fatal weakness or a triumphant asset; Senator John McCain is already into his seventies, increasingly curmudgeonly, and getting low on cash. And Mitt? He is the perfect candidate, with a perfect smile, perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect marriage that has lasted 39 years and five perfect sons, who made hundreds of millions in business before going into politics and therefore has an effectively bottomless purse.

His perfection is marred not just by his glib phoniness - he was a liberal governor who implemented a decent health-care system in Massachusetts, yet managed to lurch dramatically to the right just in time for these Republican primaries - but by the fact that he is a Mormon who wears that strange underwear, believes that humans can become gods in the afterlife, and that we should all abstain from coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, extramarital sex, and so on. To much of middle America, this translates into meaning that Romney is simply a weirdo.

Step forward 52-year-old Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister who was born in Hope, Arkansas (sound familiar?). A fiscal conservative in the Reaganesque tradition, he likes to call himself (with some justification) "the conservative who is not mad at anybody". He says he is "not interested in being the candidate of Wall Street but of Main Street" and that it is simply "wrong" that CEOs "get paid 500 times what the average worker does".

In a field of flawed oddballs, above all, Huckabee emerges as a decent and likeable man. He is now quietly creeping ahead in the polls as the 2008 campaign's stealth candidate, and has probably already done enough to earn himself at least a shot at the vice-presidential nomination.

Clinton v Romney/Huckabee, then: that is the closest I can come to producing a coherent prediction, but for all the reasons above it could prove wildly wrong. Notwithstanding all his perfection and devout faith, Romney has already dug the knife into Hillary and has twice managed to "mis-speak" by referring to Obama as "Osama". This country is in for a wild and rocky ride over the next 12 months, but then we'll know. And the one consolation is that, however flawed he or she may be, America's 44th president can hardly prove to be as disastrous as its 43rd.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website