Primary School

The US Presidential Primaries are on...

Currently the race to secure the presidential nomination for either of the main American parties is wide open, despite what you might be reading. New Hampshire will vote this week and Iowa is done and dusted. Barack and Hillary duked it out in Iowa while John Edwards saw his somewhat limited aspiration to come second and stay in the race for 2008 (not that coming second in 2004 did him much good) come to fruition.

Perhaps the biggest casualty of Iowa is Hillary Rodham Clinton. She didn't come third by a lot, according to one set of results I saw she was wazs only about 0.5% behind John Edwards. That is hardly a trouncing by anyone's standards, but it seems to have put her on the back foot a little. At least in terms of support in the media. Barack however, is riding high on a wave of love and Oprah...

But as newsweek points out the really interesting battle is for the Republican nomination.

The Grand Old Party as the Republicans are known stateside (I had to look that reference up once because I had no idea what the hell GOP actually referred to) seem to be in disarray. Before Iowa no-one would've given Huckabee a snowball's chance in hell of winning anything and now he is the frontrunner *shiver*. It seems the choice is between an evangelical Baptist preacher with dubious views about issues like homsexuality, abortion, immigration and little knowledge of foreign policy and Romney the Mormon, with no really fixed views on anything at all.

I am not sure what is in the water in Iowa but it is certainly working in the Huckster's favour. For the record Guiliani managed to garner a massive 3% of the vote, Ron Paul did better than polling would have predicted and the top three were rounded out by Romney and Thompson. McCain came a close fourth. As yet all Republican contenders are continuing the fight, two of the Dems have fallen by the wayside although Kucinich the vegan is still in the running.

It seems that New Hampshire might shake things up for the GOP, certainly there seems to be an expectation that McCain will gain some momentum and that Romney et al. should be able to slow down the Huckster, nevertheless the power of Chuck Norris should never be underestimated.

It is not entirely clear what the implications are of the Iowa primaries, or indeed any of the early votes, in terms of predicting the actual outcome of the primary race. Certainly there is a new cast to the contentious issue of whether a black man could be elected president. It seems Iowan Dems think he is electable, more electable than a white woman (not unsurprising) and a rich, white, male lawyer (which is admittedly a little surprising). It is a message that is bound to resonate at least through to New Hampshire who will vote later this week and perhaps further into the primary race.

So sit back relax and enjoy the ride. But a word to the wise, one of these people will be running the country in 2008... Chuck Norris for President?!