The fresh new face and potential Hillary-stopper Barack Obama has still not decided on a presidential run, but he made a lot of new friends in the midterm elections. He made an impressive total of 50 appearances in 30 states, helping Democrats in tight races and banking up favours that could come in very useful in a presidential campaign. The latest "likeability" poll run by Quinnipiac University, asking voters to express their feelings about 20 leading politicians without considering substance, saw Obama win the title of most likeable Democrat. Rudy Giuliani came top, John McCain was third and Hillary came in ninth. But four out of ten voters said they did not know enough about Obama to have much of an opinion. And Giuliani's likeability reflects his national standing after his response to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. "Likeable" was not exactly the word most New Yorkers would have used to describe their prickly mayor on 10th September.
The other primary race
The 2008 presidential campaign is going to be very different, and not only because it is the first time since 1952 that a president or vice-president will not be on the ballot. Unexpected new scenes will swell the familiar opening acts of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Minorities and labour unions have long grumbled about the dominance of those two lily-white and rural states. So in 2008, Nevada will hold its own caucuses immediately after Iowa, which means not only a large Hispanic electorate but also a large number of union members, thanks to all those Las Vegas hotels. And South Carolina, where black voters make up 30 per cent of the total, will hold its primary the week after New Hampshire. Now parties in the south and west are starting to demand the same influence in the primaries that their rising populations give them in elections. The speakers of the state legislatures of Florida and California are each lobbying to move their own primary dates forward to the first week of February. This would give a strong advantage to frontrunners with fat war chests, who can afford the television advertising for such giant media markets. The old person-to-person campaigning in Iowa classrooms and potluck suppers in the private homes of New Hampshire would give way to costly media campaigns. The heavyweights like Giuliani, McCain and Hillary like the idea, but underfunded candidates looking for an early breakthrough hate it. In the 2004 primaries, one of those underdogs was Howard Dean, now Democratic party chairman and well placed to fight off the bid by the big states to muscle their way in.
A Mormon president?
One multiethnic and heavily unionised state already has an early primary—Michigan, depressed home to the crumbling auto industry and the place where John McCain's campaign took off with a stunning victory in 2000. McCain likes to think of Michigan as his ace in the hole, but he suddenly has a problem in Mitt Romney, the outgoing Republican governor of Massachusetts, who hails from Michigan. The in-fighting has begun. The state's Republican party chairman, Saul Anuzis, who has links to Romney, claims a campaign is under way to unseat him, and the conservative blogs are claiming that McCain's supporters are behind it.
Romney may be the most interesting Republican candidate of the season, after his impressive stint as governor of staunchly Democratic Massachusetts, where he launched the country's best health insurance programme. Romney has impeccable conservative credentials: pro-life, against gay marriage and federal funds for stem cell research. But he is a Mormon, and plenty of Republicans—particularly evangelicals—say they could never vote for a member of such a church. To overcome this, Romney has quietly organised meetings with evangelical church leaders in South Carolina to stress that he believes in Jesus and the resurrection, and that his policies won't be answerable to the Mormon church. Just before the midterms, Romney hosted a soup and sandwich lunch for national church leaders, including Billy Graham's son Franklin and Christian Coalition stalwarts Gary Bauer and Jerry Falwell. At an earlier meeting with the Christian Alliance in the farming state of Iowa, Romney was asked if his faith's ban on alcohol would make him oppose ethanol as a substitute for petrol. "I don't put it in my body," he replied, "but I will put it in my car."
No one wants to work with Condi
It's getting embarrassing over at the state department, where Condi keeps losing her men. Her deputy, Bob Zoellick, flounced out for Goldman Sachs in June when he was not made treasury secretary, and he has not yet been replaced. Now her old friend Phil Zelikow has quit his post as state department counsellor, and there are few willing potential replacements. The rumour is that Bob Kimmitt, currently deputy treasury secretary, and Eric Edelman (one of the few sane civilians in Rummy's Pentagon as undersecretary for policy) have turned down the offer to replace Zoellick. The obvious solution would be to promote the current undersecretary Nick Burns, formerly US ambassador to Nato, but Dick Cheney's office is against appointing a career diplomat, particularly one who made his name working in Bill Clinton's national security council.
