KEY POINTS:
It's now just over a day until Super Tuesday, and the big four candidates for President are starting to look tired as they endure exhausting schedules to win votes. They've been in as many as four states in one day, and I don't mean states that are next to each other. And in places where the candidates are not going, their supporters are holding rallies anyway. Today in New York a bunch of Hillary Clinton supporters walked up Broadway waving signs and giving out flyers to try to raise the visibility of their favourite candidate. They got toots of support, but a few boos from anti-Clinton passers-by.
There are different rules in almost every state for Super Tuesday's voting so it can be very hard to predict who will end up on top. On the Democrat side, delegates who go to the party's national convention later this year to select the candidate officially, will be apportioned to Clinton or Barack Obama according to how much of the Super Tuesday vote they get in each state. Sound confusing? What it means is that even if Obama looks like he's going to lose California to Clinton on Tuesday, it's still worth him campaigning there because he will get a portion of the available delegates if he gets some of the vote. That makes the travel schedule all the more demanding.
On the Republican side some states are winner take all, meaning if McCain or Romney win, they get all of the delegates from that state. But some states are not winner take all. As you can imagine, it all makes predictions pretty difficult. There's no doubt the American Presidential election process takes a lot of study to understand. We thought MMP was complicated!
Candidates are 'stumping' sometimes four or five times a day at the moment. In front of partisan audiences at colleges and other venues they give a stock-standard speech and enjoy the screeching of the crowd at all the right intervals. Obama seems to have the strongest reaction when he goes somewhere, maybe because his audience often includes a lot of young people.
The topics the candidates are covering typically are both domestic and international. Healthcare and education and lifting people's incomes are big for the Democrats, while they also like taking a shot or two at President Bush's foreign policy. Clinton and Obama talk about the economy, but frame it in ways that lead through to health, education, and so on. Some of the policies being talked about would raise eyebrows in NZ. To stem the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, Clinton wants a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures and a freeze on interest rates on those mortgages for five years. Obama wants to give a study grant of $4000 a year to people to go to university, but in return they have to go and do some kind of community service work.
The economy is big for the Republicans, and so is national security. McCain pushes the fact that he backed the surge of troops in Iraq before it became popular among Republicans to do so, while Romney argues he is the best man to steer the economy through its difficulties because he has run large businesses.
But for a few hours today, politics is taking a back seat to the Superbowl. There are parties everywhere and bars screening the big football game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots all around the city. It's big.
I don't think many people will be watching the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Shriver, speaking at a campaign rally for Obama on C-Span right now...
