However courteous their public exchanges, an open war for talent has broken out between Hillary and Obama. The old Clinton administration's foreign policy team has split asunder, with former national security adviser Tony Lake leading the surge to Obama's camp. Lake's co-chair of Obama's squad of diplomats-in-waiting is Bill Clinton's old assistant secretary of state for Africa, Susan Rice. She is the Democrats' answer to her namesake Condi, being just as smart but even easier on the eye. The Republicans believe that Susan was the Clinton administration official who turned down, or perhaps bungled, an offer from the Sudanese government in 1997 to hand over a pesky young Arab radical called Osama bin Laden. Susan denies that any serious offer was ever made, and that enquiries to the Sudanese were never followed up. But expect to hear much more about this in Senate confirmation hearings if and when President-elect Obama nominates her as his secretary of state.
Tony Lake's successor at the Clinton White House, Sandy Berger, has been emailing Bill's veterans, trying to hold them for Hillary, but with limited success. All the younger strategists who impressed their European counterparts back in the 1990s are signing up for Obama. They include former national security council staffers like Ivo Daalder and Philip Gordon (both at the Brookings Institution), and Charles Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University. Daalder has been drafting a big foreign policy essay in Obama's name for the next issue of Foreign Affairs. With Putin's Russia looking ever more hostile, the text is unlikely to argue for the real case Tony Lake's youngsters want to make—a dramatic slashing of strategic nuclear warheads, down to a few hundred. But the cause is close to the heart of Irish-born Samantha Power, who has been Obama's foreign policy adviser since his Senate campaign. The term "flame-haired temptress" has yet to cross the Atlantic, but it would fit the 37-year-old Harvard professor, whose book A Problem from Hell won a Pulitzer four years ago.
Berger has two big problems, quite apart from the contrast between Obama's novelty and Hillary's dowdy familiarity. The first is his own conviction, in 2005, for smuggling classified documents out of the national archives in his socks. He lost his security clearance for three years, and will find it tough to get confirmed in any senior job by the Senate. The second is the unpopular presence in the Hillary camp of those two big beasts Madeleine Albright and Richard "Dirty Dick" Holbrooke. Holbrooke is cordially loathed by most people who have worked for him, while Albright was deemed to be past it eight years ago.
There is a pattern that runs through the Hillary-Obama rivalry: Hillary has the old farts, while Obama has the young thrusters. But Democratic presidential nominations tend to be won by the old fart machine—witness John Kerry's success in 2004. And where the old farts really count is at the convention. Voters in the primaries send just over 80 per cent of the delegates. The rest are super-delegates, senior party figure who get to vote by their sheer eminence. If Hillary and Obama split the primary vote evenly, the old farts will decide.
Running-mates and marginal states
There is a second Hillary-Obama war: over expressing the right kind of discreet interest in the right kind of potential running-mate. The one qualification that matters for both Hillary and Obama is the ability to carry a marginal state next November. Three people can do this. One is John Edwards. But he failed to deliver either North or South Carolina last time (he has roots in both). So forget him, unless his votes have to be bought at a divided convention. That leaves Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia, and Evan Bayh, former governor of Indiana. Hillary is leaning to Bayh. Obama is leaning to Warner, and not only because he is a self-made zillionaire. The symbolism of a black candidate running with a white governor from the heart of the old confederacy is delicious.
A Christmas primary?
The race to be the first state to hold a primary has become so ridiculous that New Hampshire says it will hold its own before Christmas this year if that is what it takes to hold its traditional "first of the nation" place. And the bizarre dynamics of the new primary system have made John McCain's camp very cheerful, even though his polls and fundraising have been lagging. John Weaver, McCain's campaign strategist, points to local state polls that have his man leading Rudy Giuliani by five points in New Hampshire and by one point in Iowa. The theory is that McCain wins these and uses the momentum to slingshot into Florida. With McCain established as the leading hawk, and only 26 per cent of Republican voters saying the Iraq war has been a mistake, they think they will then have the nomination sewn up. The only problem then will be winning the presidential election, when vast majorities of Democrats and independents agree that the war has been a disaster.
