Nick Bourne AM

The saying “Will it play in Peoria” used, apparently, to be said of Vaudeville acts.  It was a given that if it didn’t go down well in Peoria, Illinois, it wouldn’t go down in middle or main street America.It came to be used of any product or any political party or candidate.  Perhaps not too much can be read from the result of the Democratic Primary ( solid Obama win ) in Illinois, it is, after all, Barack Obama’s home state, but the quintessentially bellwether state for US Presidentials is not Illinois but Missouri.  On Tuesday night, or more correctly Wednesday morning , I got up early to watch CNN as the results came in from the various States (22 of them) that were voting on ‘Super Tuesday’.  Missouri was on a knife-edge, but most pollsters and CNN were calling it for Clinton in the early hours of the morning. Hillary Clinton was well ahead in the rural areas and most agencies and pollsters took that as an indication that she was going to win the State.
More seasoned observers who knew the State said that Barack Obama would fight back in Kansas City (paradoxically it is in Missouri) and St Louis (pronounced as in Lewis Hamilton rather than in Louis Armstrong).  That indeed proved to be the case but not before Hillary Clinton and her team had gone on record as saying how significant it was that she had won in Missouri because that was the State that historically picked the next US President in whichever of the primaries, with one exception in 1956.  The Clinton camp must have regretted that move as votes piled up from the urban areas and Barack Obama overtook Clinton to win Missouri by a small margin.
I believe the momentum is still with Barack Obama and I would be surprised if he does not emerge as the Democrat candidate now against McCain, and although both seem to me to be worthy candidates, I believe that Obama is the person with the attributes and qualities that are needed to meet the challenges that America and, indeed, the world face at the start of the 21^st Century.
I stayed up for far longer than I had intended to watch the results coming in, just as in general elections.  Only political anoraks will understand this, somehow the results from Preston or North Tayside take on a significance that is hard to explain to those who have not been bitten by the political bug.
I sat there in front of the screen captivated by the way delegates were voting in Alaska and Utah, luxuriating as precinct by precinct and county by county the results were analysed beyond most humans’ endurance.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 4:54 pm and is filed under News from the bay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.