sooper

I've only just got over Super (Bowl) Sunday - which has a slightly bizarre coverage on UK television because the extensive advert breaks are instead covered by three men wearing very large headphones and talking cryptically. I think its because the two American presenters didn't always understand what the Brit anchor person was saying.

And that brings me to Super Tuesday, which I think is pronounced Soooper Toozday if I'm to get it right. Its supposed to be the next critical moment in the American election campaign which some how runs all the way through to the end of the year. And most of the coverage seems to be about the Democrats and whether gender or ethnicity affects outcome. The other guys carrying the Dubya banner and hiding the recession don't seem to get a look in - I wonder why?

It seems odd that everyone votes at different times (presumably so the candidates can visit more areas) and then the big places like New York, Califormia and another 22 States all vote on the same day. A strange dance.

Someone has worked out that a single candidate needs to accumulate 2025 delegates to be in the lead, and I guess it makes me wonder just how many delegates there are crammed into the main Houses of the US Government machine. And what's a super delegate? Do they have special powers? Can they fly? Do they get a 'by' into the next round? Its all very confusing.

Maybe thats why it seems to be mainly about two personalities rather than the intricacies of why 26 of the 53 Democratic congressional districts in California will award four delegates requiring a candidate to get 62.5% of the vote in that district to be sure to win.

I still apply my 'racing to Calais' model to this type of thing. You start in Cannes and drive to Calais to catch a ferry. At the start you only need to average 45 km per hour and can have two pit stops. Somehow, by the time you get to Dijon, after a couple of major delays, the average for the rest of the journey has become 95 km/hr. Still doable, then that big roadworks with the white robot flagman costs an hour and mysteriously you now need to do 120 km/hr. And then each time the brakes go on, the average speed for the remainder mysteriously increases. When it gets to over 150 km/hr, you finally phone ahead for another hotel night somewhere.

I guess one of the candidates will be doing that at some point near Dijon Denver, when it becomes inevitable that the lead has moved incontravertibly to the other person. Its a great tactic at the moment though, because the rest of the world is hardly even hearing about Republicans and thinks that McCain is a type of (ironically) French Fry.