America has always been slightly defensive about the way it chooses its presidential nominees. Its spectacularly representative system of primaries and caucuses is seen to be perverted somewhat by the disproportional influence of the early, small states. So, once New Hampshire voted against expectations, and differently from Iowa, last week, opening up the race among the Democrats and Republicans, nobody could stop celebrating. “The story won’t be foretold,” says Time (January 21) in its cover story The voter’s revenge. “It will unfold.” The credit goes to the voters: “Just as the voters of Iowa hadn’t wanted to be told that (Hillary) Clinton was the inevitable nominee, Democrats in New Hampshire weren’t much in the mood to be told that her candidacy was toast, that their votes were futile. In the final hours, the undecideds, who often end up too torn among candidates or too busy to bother voting, made their way to the polls and carried Clinton to victory. Obama got 37 per cent, just as the polls projected. But, she got 40 per cent instead of 30 per cent, and Obama’s lead disappeared, her fortunes revived, and both sides now have to plan for a campaign whose only certainty is uncertainty.”Newsweek stays with the questions of race, gender and power that the Clinton-Obama contest is framing. With the Democratic candidate most likely to be a woman or an African-American, voters have a tough choice. “I really hate that they had to run at the same time in the same election,” says a voter in South Carolina, which votes on January 26.The Republican race too is open, but it is nonetheless, argues The Economist, a mess: “The Republicans look like dead men walking. Americans regard the Democrats as more competent than Republicans by a margin of five to three and more ethical by a margin of two to one.” It argues that the Bush administration’s mishandling of Iraq and the economy, especially, has cracked the coalition of social conservatives, defence conservatives and anti-tax conservatives forged by Ronald Reagan. But more than that: “Reagan had a lasting influence not just because he forged a coalition but also because he was right on the biggest issues of his time — the importance of shrinking government and facing down communism. The Republicans are now in danger of being either wrong or half wrong on two of the defining issues of our time — global warming and radical Islam.”Meanwhile: In the The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch says an inevitable withdrawal from Iraq could “poison American politics for a geration”: “We think of the Vietnam War as controversial, but it was much more controversial within the two parties than between them. The partisan gap in support for the war rarely exceeded 10 percentage points, and averaged closer to 5. The Iraq War has been something else again. It got off on a partisan footing, with support from virtually all of the Republicans in Congress but only a minority of the Democrats. By mid-2004, the difference between Republican and Democratic public support for the war had reached about 60 percentage points. Indeed, many of the partisans were living in separate realities. In 2006 polling, only about a fifth of Democrats recalled ever having supported the war, though in fact, almost half had supported it before the invasion. Meanwhile, almost a third of Republicans thought weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and another third said the weapons existed but hadn’t been found.”
