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Long march to the White House
13/03/2008 12:23 - (SA)
Washington - White House pretenders have trekked from the snowy plains of Iowa to the banks of the Rio Grande, shouting themselves hoarse at hundreds of campaign stops, and still the race is far from run.
The longest, costliest and most scintillating primary battle yet has only just yielded a Republican winner, John McCain, while the deadlocked Democrats face the real threat of a convention brawl for the first time in decades.
It seems like an eternity since the starting gun was fired.
In fact, it is only two months since Iowa launched the 2008 nominating epic on January 3, vaulting Senator Barack Obama to the front of the Democratic pack in a shock to former first lady Hillary Clinton.
The US bread basket had brought forward its caucuses as a rush of other states agitated to have a bigger say in the presidential process.
Florida and Michigan became pariahs for advancing their ballots into January.
The compressed calendar left the candidates, their staff and the hordes of travelling press traipsing through the deep snowbanks of Iowa and New Hampshire instead of celebrating the holidays with their families.
"There was a time when being told that I would be spending New Year's Eve in Des Moines would have, well, sobered me up in a New York minute," New York Times chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney told AFP.
Expectations
While Obama triumphed in Iowa, Clinton came back in New Hampshire on January 8, setting an enduring pattern of the candidates trading blow for blow with no knock-out punch.
For the Republicans, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee upset all calculations by taking Iowa before McCain sealed a Lazarus-like recovery in New Hampshire, after he had looked down and out in mid-2007.
The millionaire former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, saw his strategy of landing early blows start to unravel. Ex-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani sat in the corner with a plan to hit back hard in Florida.
It was always a high-risk strategy and in the end it proved disastrous for Giuliani, who, like Clinton, was deemed the "inevitable" nominee when campaigning for 2008 started in earnest all the way back in January 2007.
But this is a race that has upended expectations time and again.
Only three years into his first Senate term, Obama has come from nowhere to wow packed auditoriums with the promise of change on decades of partisan bickering.
The steely Clinton has shown a human side, twice coming to the brink of tears on the gruelling trail, before donning her armour again to take the fight back to her charismatic rival.
$700m in fundraising so far
Democrats are fired up, and have given far more than Republicans to their contenders. Fundraising overall now approaches an astonishing $700m, and political spending is on course to top $1bn by November.
On through stops in big cities and one-horse settlements, the candidates were getting by on less and less sleep as political temperatures rose in the build-up to "Super Tuesday".
Angry at the threat from his wife's upstart rival, former president Bill Clinton lashed out at Obama, made reference to a "fairy tale," and triggered accusations that he was playing the race card against the
charismatic African-American.
Super Tuesday on February 5 ended in deadlock between Clinton and Obama, who then picked up speed to win the month's ensuing 11 ballots and leave the New York senator's White House hopes on the edge of
oblivion.
"Remember New Hampshire," Obama had said, his caution proving correct as Clinton wrenched back the initiative last week in Ohio and Texas, helped by ominous ads questioning her rival's capacity to deal with a 03:00 crisis.
And so on through Pennsylvania on April 22, Puerto Rico on June 7, and perhaps all the way to the Democrats' August convention for a show-stopping, prime-time civil war for the right to take on McCain in November's election.
Democratic Party too battered and bruised?
The blows are getting ever more savage, and anxiety is building that the Democratic Party will emerge too battered and bruised to carry the fight to the Republicans.
"The bottom line is that it's time for a time out," according to former Clinton administration aide and ABC News host George Stephanopoulos.
"These guys have been going at it for what, 18 months. Their nerves are frayed, they're exhausted and they're making mistakes," he said.
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