Still at square one in Oval race

Over New Year's, my 9-year-old daughter, who is just beginning to take an interest in politics, stared at a Democratic candidates' debate on television.

Furrowing her small brow she asked: “Explain to me again why Iowa gets to go first?''

Good question, that.

There is a school of thought in American politics which holds that Super Tuesday is the single-best argument for the strange, year-long spectacle of the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

This is ironic, because Super Tuesday was created way back in the 1980s in an effort to diminish the outsized role Iowa and New Hampshire play in nominating presidents.

Of course, it has not worked out that way. This year, as in so many election years past, the difficulty of playing the political game on a national stage has inevitably made Iowa and New Hampshire more, not less, important.

This year, as in the past, these two small, bitterly cold and wholly unrepresentative locales have, as they usually do, winnowed the wannabes from the real contenders and provided a few lucky politicians with a huge dose of national publicity.

Those who succeed, or at least beat expectations, in Iowa and New Hampshire, head into Super Tuesday seeming suddenly plausible, as a big chunk of the country gets ready to vote.

But as the campaign goes national, it also changes in fundamental ways. Public events are no longer small gatherings.

The trend is towards ever-larger rallies, which tend to become evermore carefully scripted and stage-managed as the campaign progresses.

Candidates who were sitting in voters' living rooms in December are, by February, addressing events offering all the intimacy of a Rolling Stones concert.

They also spend more and more of their time raising money, much of which is then spent on television adverts.

So the best reply to my daughter's question is: Iowa goes first because when you start somewhere small, it means a few people, at least, actually get to see the candidates in person and talk to them.

Note that this is not an argument for letting Iowa and/or New Hampshire per se jump to the head of the queue every four years.

It is an acknowledgement that in an era when most Americans will never come close to seeing a presidential candidate, let alone an actual president, in the flesh, it is good to have an early round or two in which the would-be presidents are forced to have actual contact with actual voters.

But that, as the Stones once sang, is all over now. On Tuesday, February 5, voters in nearly two dozen American states will go to the polls in what promises to be a pivotal day in this year's presidential contest.

Starting now, the campaign is mainly about national media exposure and money.

And, make no mistake, there is a lot of money involved. A statewide advertising campaign in California alone can cost around $4 million a week and with the presidential campaign now playing out simultaneously in pretty much every part of the country, the costs for all of the candidates are extreme.

The February 5 vote is called Super Tuesday. The name has been around since the 1980s.

But this year, so many more states are voting (22 for the Democrats, 20 for the Republicans — roughly double the number of states that voted in 2004's Super Tuesday), and the stakes, therefore, are so much higher than in previous elections that some pundits are calling the day “Super Duper Tuesday''.

Others have opted for “Tsunami Tuesday''.

In this, as in the earlier contests, the goal is to line up delegates to the parties' national conventions, which take place at the end of the summer.

A century ago, these quadrennial gatherings were black holes of political intrigue in which the party bosses who controlled the various state delegations bargained with one another for power.

Since the 1960s, that system has gradually been replaced by state-level primaries and caucuses through which voters pick the delegates to the nominating conventions.

Individual delegates arrive at the convention required by the rules to support a particular candidate, rendering the roll-call vote of state delegations little more than a telegenic historical relic.

As Tuesday night stretches into Wednesday morning, the media is likely to focus on how many states each candidate has won or lost.

But the real race is for the delegates — and that promises to be far less straightforward.

Primary and caucus mathematics are such that Super Tuesday is far more complicated than a simple “Who won California?''

Each party will pick around a quarter of its convention delegates through the February 5 primaries and caucuses.

For presidential candidates, the magic numbers are 2,025 for the Democrats and 1,191 for the Republicans — numbers that, for each party, represent a majority of the total number of convention delegates.

These numbers are set by the parties themselves, the Republican number being lower because the Grand Old Party, or the GOP, stages a significantly smaller national convention.

Theoretically, there are enough delegates at stake on February 5 to let someone lock up either party's nomination.

In fact, ending the contest early and decisively was what leaders of both parties hoped would happen when they designed this year's nominating process.

A month into the primary and caucus season, however, there is still no clear front runner in either party and the process looks like it may continue well beyond Super Tuesday.

On the Democratic side, a total of 2,064 delegates are at stake across the 22 primaries and caucuses, but roughly half the total are allocated to just four states: California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey.

Since Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama represent New York and Illinois respectively in the senate (and it can be assumed that each will dominate the voting in his or her home state), national attention is focused mainly on California — with its huge trove of 441 delegates.

Democrats allocate their convention delegates state by state roughly in proportion to the vote each candidate receives.

This is straightforward enough (though there are caveats), but it does mean that the margin of victory is in some ways more important than winning or losing per se.

Thus, if either Clinton or Obama were to win every single state, but did so by razor-thin margins, the result would be headlines the next day reading “Clean Sweep''.

But when the delegates are added up, the two would still be effectively tied.

In this respect, the Republicans have a system better calculated to produce a decisive result.

Eight of their 20 Super Tuesday states are “winner-takes-all'' contests, where every delegate will go to whoever comes first in the popular vote.

Two of the big states (New York and New Jersey) use this system, as do a number of medium-size states (Missouri, Connecticut).

In practical terms, what does all this mean? The de facto national primary is calculated to reward candidates who are both well-organised and well-financed.

Among the Democrats, this has long been assumed to play to Hillary Clinton's strengths. But Barack Obama has proved to be just as well-organised and adept at raising money as the New York senator and former First Lady.

This separates him from a long line of previous Democratic hopefuls who have tried and failed to challenge the party establishment.

Obama is widely expected to do especially well in what are called “open'' primary states, that is, states where Independents and Republicans, rather than just the party faithful, can vote for the Democratic nominee.

These include a number of states such as Missouri and Tennessee, which tend to go Republican in the presidential elections but where Obama's ability to appeal across party lines could significantly help him both now and, were he to be the nominee, in November.

Moving through Super Tuesday, two unknown factors bear watching.

The first is John Edwards. After nudging Clinton into third place in Iowa, his campaign has seemed to fade.

At one debate in late January, he was reduced to reminding the moderator that there actually were three candidates on the stage, not two.

Because the Democrats do not run winner-takes-all primaries, he continues to accumulate delegates.

Even if he were to draw only 10 or 12 per cent of the Super Tuesday vote and then pull out, that would still leave him with somewhere between 200 and 250 delegates at the end of the day.

If the Clinton-Obama race remains close, it could leave Edwards in the enviable position of party kingmaker.

The second caveat concerns the 463 Democrats known as Super Delegates. These are members of the Congress, governors, state and city party chairs, and other senior officials.

Seventy or 30 years ago, they would have been the only people who really mattered.

Today, they no longer control the process — but they do get their voting slots at the convention by virtue of their positions. And unlike the other delegates, they can vote for whomever they please.

As of this writing, Clinton had received pledges of support from 200 Super Delegates, Obama 114 and Edwards 32.

That leaves 117 undecided. Note also that, unlike ordinary delegates, Super Delegates can change their candidate preference.

In addition, were Edwards to drop out, he would be able to order his elected delegates to vote for the candidate of his choice, but those 32 Super Delegates do not remain under his control.

If, by summer, neither Obama nor Clinton can lock up the magic number of 2,025 votes, everything will come to ride on the Super Delegates.

Four years ago, Democrats deserted Howard Dean and flocked to John Kerry first in Iowa, then in New Hampshire and then, with great finality, on Super Tuesday.

Kerry, mainly because of his military record, was perceived as the most electable candidate.

This calculation remains central to today's Democratic voters as well.

For all the talk of making history by putting a woman or an African-American atop the party's ticket, the ability to win in November remains what most Democrats are worried about.

Hillary Clinton has sought to turn this into an asset, arguing in debate after debate that she alone is truly battle-tested on the national stage.

The trick for her may be overcoming suspicion among some party members that the Republicans seem just a bit too eager to run against her in November.

Equally awkward is her status as Democratic establishment's candidate in a year when “change'' is the value everyone in both parties seems to want to embrace.

Barack Obama faces a different set of challenges. He needs to win in more than a few places on Super Tuesday to prove that he really is a plausible president.

Obama has been handicapped in recent weeks by the perverse nature of the primary system. In the only race that really matters — delegate count — he and Clinton are essentially tied.

But the wider public focuses on the headlines and the headlines since New Hampshire have been “Clinton Wins''.

So Obama not only needs the mathematical advantage that comes from winning delegates but also the psychological momentum that comes from finishing first — preferably in at least one big state beyond Illinois (when it comes to headlines, winning your home state does not count for much).

To do this, he needs to do a better job of winning over the party faithful. Bringing new voters, especially young people, into the process, is admirable but it will not win him the nomination.

If Obama needs to prove the breadth of his support within the party, John Edwards's situation is far more desperate: He needs to win a couple of states, even small ones on Super Tuesday.

Lacking that, it is hard to see how he will have the money or the momentum to continue.

With the recent departure of Fred Thompson, the Republican field has become smaller, though not necessarily clearer.

Mike Huckabee has seemed to fade in recent weeks, failing to get much traction outside the evangelical Christian community that provided him with his margin of victory in Iowa.

John McCain has re-emerged as a major candidate six months after virtually everyone wrote his campaign off as dead.

But the straightforward image that appeals to many Democrats and independents does him little good and a fair amount of harm among many Republican activists.

Rudy Giuliani, largely absent from the field until now, has staked his entire campaign on a novel strategy of bypassing the early states and heading straight to Florida and Super Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has used his more-or-less unlimited money supply to pour resources into every single state, no matter how obscure or small.

The result is that he has been pulling in delegates everywhere, even as the media has focused more intently on his three rivals.

Romney is not the first candidate to try this strategy, but he might turn out to be the first one to make it work.

And the media? Many of them crave a brokered convention — something virtually no working reporter has actually experienced, since the last time either party had one was 1952.

A brokered convention occurs when no candidate manages to get a majority of delegates on the first ballot.

At that point, all delegates are free to vote for whoever they wish and practically anything can happen … which is exactly why it has not happened in 56 years.

Brokered conventions look very, very messy on national television. The Democrats actually created their Super Delegate system precisely to guarantee that a brokered convention would never occur.

Rest assured that if it looks like that might really happen, the party mandarins will put a stop to it long before the convention convenes in late August.

This, of course, involves no little historical irony. It places the responsibility for making sure conventions run smoothly with exactly the sort of political bosses whose backroom deals the primary system was designed to squelch.

Because with Iowa and New Hampshire behind us, the rest of the election campaign is pretty much about television: television commercials, televised speeches, televised debates and televised conventions.

It probably is not an ideal way to pick a president but, for now, it is what we have.

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