Endless campaign, passing interest

Some months ago I used this space to predict that if the race for the Democratic presidential nomination were not settled in early February, when the Super Tuesday results were known, then it was likely to come down to Pennsylvania.

People will still be voting in Pennsylvania when this column rolls off the press and appears on Gulf News website in the early hours of Dubai's Wednesday morning. But let me take this opportunity to state the obvious - I called that one wrong. The odds on Pennsylvania's settling anything at this point are close to nil.

The American political world will march on towards Indiana and North Carolina on May 6. From there, in all likelihood, the campaign will continue. West Virginia votes on May 13, Kentucky and Oregon on the 20th, Puerto Rico on June 1 and, finally, on June 3 Montana and South Dakota.

Over the past few weeks there has been a shift in the conventional wisdom surrounding the campaign, with Barack Obama's nomination now treated by much of the nation's political press as a near-inevitability.

Of course, mathematically, this has been the case for about six weeks, but as recently as the beginning of this month many in the media maintained the illusion that we were still witnessing a close fight which might end up going either way.

This was true in theory but ignored the fact that a losing streak like the one Hillary Clinton went on in February would have driven virtually any other candidate from the race.

The new story line is that Obama will win the nomination, but in the process he has fallen back to earth. He is no longer a transcendent figure, merely a politician, albeit a remarkably talented one.

In particular, much attention is being paid to a series of national polls that show both Obama and Clinton running essentially even with the expected Republican nominee, John McCain.

An ABC News poll last week had Obama beating McCain in the fall by five points and Clinton losing by three (with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3 points).

'Wrong track'

Keep in mind that other national polls over the past three months have shown more than 70 per cent of Americans answering that the country is on the "wrong track".

Even allowing for both President George W. Bush not being on the ballot this year and McCain's recent efforts to distance himself from the current president those numbers ought to point towards an easy victory for whomever the Democrats wind up nominating.

The fact that they do not is widely seen as evidence that the protracted fight for the Democratic nomination has damaged the party. Perhaps this will prove to be so.

But it is worth remembering that the real election - the one that actually picks the next president - does not take place for more than six months. That would be an awfully long time in an ordinary year, let alone one in which very little has played out the way supposed experts believed it would.

Because the real point that needs to be made here is that polls in April mean next to nothing when it comes to predicting how the country will vote in November.

A perfect example of this occurred last Sunday. Fox News displayed a map of how the election is likely to turn out November based on state-by-state polls taken over the last few weeks.

The map gave McCain a big lead over Obama, but a close look revealed more than a few oddities. For example, Massachusetts, arguably the most solidly Democratic state in the country, was labelled a toss-up while perennial toss-up state Ohio was listed as solidly GOP.

A snapshot poll today might hint in that direction, but come November it simply is not going to happen.

Turn out

Even Karl Rove, Bush's former top strategist and now a Fox election analyst, remarked: "We are several geological ages away from the fall election, so no one should take this as determinative of how the election is going to turn out."

The biggest reason why April has so little bearing on November is that so few people are actually paying attention. The truth is that very few people really follow politics obsessively.

Even in this uniquely active political year it is far more common for people to pay attention for a week or two as their own state prepares to vote, and then to tune out.

So the campaign will continue, regardless of what happens in Pennsylvania, and the media frenzy will continue along with it. Just don't make the mistake of confusing that frenzy with actual people making up their minds about how to vote. That, for the most part, is still a long way off.

Gordon Robison is a journalist and consultant based in Burlington, Vermont & Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has lived in and reported on the Middle East for two decades, including assignments in Baghdad for both CNN and Fox News.