DATELINE: Portland, Oregon
In downstate Oregon the other day, I had been talking to Mr and Mrs Comfort-Inn about their disappointment over Mitt Romney’s exit from the race. They didn’t think much of the Republican frontrunner John McCain. Would they be voting for Mike Huckabee then, the more conservative alternative to McCain?
“Well, he did do well [...]

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DATELINE: Iowa City, Iowa
“Only a numbskull thinks he knows things about things he knows nothing about” (Amy Archer, The Hudsucker Proxy)
Here’s the latest polling for Iowa.
But polling schmolling. Marlene the clinical scientist from the Hillary Clinton rally last night seemed to be for Clinton – she clapped along in all the right places, wore the [...]

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Part of the reason we are doing this trip NOW, for THIS election, is that it’s the closest and most exciting primary race in decades. Precedents and predictions are crumbling like a giant political stock cube. Received wisdom is being returned to sender, unopened.
The only certainty that existed during this autumn’s phoney war was Hillary [...]

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With less than three weeks left until the Iowa caucus on 3 January (and a whopping 46 weeks until the actual election itself in November) the candidates on both sides are desperately jockeying for position. If you can lock up Iowa and New Hampshire, you get the much-vaunted ‘big mo’(mentum), which may sound silly, but [...]

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