{"id":746,"date":"2007-12-09T11:46:18","date_gmt":"2007-12-09T10:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=746"},"modified":"2007-12-09T11:46:18","modified_gmt":"2007-12-09T10:46:18","slug":"the-american-presidential-election-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=746","title":{"rendered":"The American presidential election (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As someone with a close interest in politics, I&#8217;ve been following the early stages of the race to be the next President of the United States.  Of course, the race seems to have been going on for ages already, but the first real results in the primaries &#8211; as opposed to vacillating opinion polls &#8211; occur in the New Year and the actual election is in November.<br \/>\nThe very first actual poll is in Iowa on 3 January. Now most non-Americans are not even sure where Iowa is &#8211; it&#8217;s in the rural mid-West and for a map see <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Iowa\">here<\/a>. But, even for Americans, this is certainly not in any sense broadly representative of the US. As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/uselections08\/story\/0,,2224726,00.html\">an interesting article<\/a> in today&#8217;s &#8220;Observer&#8221; newspaper puts it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Iowa is far from a typical slice of America. It has all that electoral power yet it is overwhelmingly white in a country where ethnic minorities are growing. It is a rural place whereas most Americans live in cities. It is a place where corn and the farm dominate politics. It is a state where Republican religious conservatives make up some 40 per cent of the vote.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Things become even stranger when one realises that there are only three million Iowans who can vote in the primary, compared say to 23 million Texans or 37 million Californians. But most of them won&#8217;t vote because this is not an election in the conventional sense. It is a caucus which requires voters to turn up at a meeting and debate the merits of the various candidates before putting up a hand for one candidate. The guess is that only around 100,00 Democrats and 1000,000 Republicans will actually turn up.<br \/>\nOn the Republican side, the big three are Mick Huckabee (a religious conservative who has suddenly sprung into the lead), Mitt Romney (another religious conservative but a Mormon to boot), and Rudy Giuliani ( the former New York governor with an odd mix of conservative and liberal positions). On the Democratic side, the big three are Hillary Clinton, the former president&#8217;s wife who has consistently been in the lead nationally but slipped dramatically in Iowa, Barack Obama, a black candidate who has assumed the lead in Iowa, and John Edwards, one of the most radical of the Democratic field.<br \/>\nI am a long-standing supporter of Barack Obama and have blogged about him regularly since <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.co.uk\/nighthawk-static\/permalink.php?id=489_0_1_0_C\">my first posting<\/a> mentioning him as long ago as April 2004. I think that he genuinely cares about social justice both in the USA and around the world and he is a very effective communicator and brings something fresh to American politics. But my closest American friend Eric is strongly backing Edwards. In fact, the Democratic field is a really strong one and there are few major policy differences between the leading candidates. I hope that Obama pulls off the candidacy but most important is to get a Democrat back in the White House.<br \/>\nThe Iowa caucus is quickly followed by the New Hampshire primary &#8211; a real vote &#8211; on 8 January. &#8216;Super Tuesday&#8217;, when more than 20 states hold primaries, will be on 5 February. So the first six weeks of 2008 should settle who will be the Presidential candidates for the Democrats and the Republicans and the actual Presidential election is on 4 November. The result has profound implications for all of us around the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As someone with a close interest in politics, I&#8217;ve been following the early stages of the race to be the next President of the United States. Of course, the race seems to have been going on for ages already, but the first real results in the primaries &#8211; as opposed to vacillating opinion polls &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}