The drama behind US elections
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
July 01, 2007

Ever since I was a child I have followed world politics the way other children collected stamps. Before my teens I had opinions on the prospects of Berlinguer and the Eurocommunists in Italy, knew that Lee Kuan Yew's surname was not Yew but Lee, and could recite the full name of Zaire's kleptomaniac dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga ("The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire and ashes in his wake." He made it up.)

My adult life in world affairs has confirmed this predilection. But even then, nothing gave me quite as much pleasure as following US Presidential contests. The spectacle of the world's oldest democracy engaged in the quadrennial act of electing its chief executive offers virtually unlimited fodder for political junkies. The multiple exercises in balloting - primary elections, caucuses, conventions, the actual elections, then the Electoral College - mean that the process takes longer than any other democracy, produces far more candidates and gives you almost unlimited opportunities to savour the fun.

If other countries' elections are like a Test match (and in some countries where Presidents-for-life routinely 'win' 99% of the vote, they are more like a one-sided ODI), the US elections are like an entire Test series, with an ODI tournament thrown in. And since the result inevitably has such a great impact on the world, you have the added bonus of having to take it all seriously.

When i first went to the US as a graduate student in September 1975, candidacies were just being declared for the elections the following year. Eight elections later, the process has started much earlier, with candidacies being announced a full two years before the next President is to take office. In 1975 the Democrats produced seven little-known contenders for the party's nomination, who were inevitably called the Seven Dwarves. This time they have Snow White as well, in the form of Hillary Clinton, the first woman front-runner in the country's history. There are eight Democrats in the fray for their party's nomination, and 10 Republicans, most of whom don't (even in this religious country) have a prayer. Already, 17 months before Voting Day, they have raised millions of dollars, begun taking out television advertisements, set up Internet websites and participated in debates. As a society, America tends always to be relentlessly focused on the future. The political world is no exception.

And it seems the future can't come fast enough for many. Normally, the process of identifying the nominees of the two principal parties takes several months, with a first winnowing at the Iowa caucuses in January, then the first primary election in New Hampshire in early February, then other states following in successive weeks, until the losers drop out and the winner emerges by May or June of the election year, ready to be anointed at the party convention that summer. This time the calendar has been dramatically accelerated. California, whose primary traditionally took place in June, became tired of having no meaningful voice (in most recent elections the parties' nominees had emerged by then) and moved its primary up to early February.

Other major states followed suit. Suddenly, the traditional place of Iowa and New Hampshire in American electoral mythology seems threatened. Candidates can no longer afford to devote all their energies to those two relatively small states; they need to husband their energies, and devote their resources, to being competitive in the far bigger states - California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Florida - which are voting earlier than ever before. Unlike in Iowa and New Hampshire, where candidates routinely accost voters in their homes or in 'diners' (local restaurants), campaigning in these big states can't be done 'retail'. It requires TV advertising, which in turn requires big money, which means the key challenge for any of the candidates to remain competitive is fund-raising. The first set of numbers that will matter are not the votes cast but the dollars raised. If you don't have the money to buy TV ads, your name won't register with the voters and you won't make an impression at the polls.

This harsh reality has already claimed its first victim: former Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, a serious moderate Democrat from an agricultural state, saw the writing on the wall when he saw the numbers in his bank account, and pulled out of the race. A similar fate undoubtedly awaits others. In both parties, conventional wisdom has it that there are only three candidates with a realistic chance, despite the long row of lecterns in each debate. Such an assessment is self-fulfilling, because the media focuses on the likely winners, thereby depriving the rest of the oxygen of public attention - without which they cannot overturn the conventional wisdom.

So the media and the pollsters have more or less decided who we must pay attention to: on the Democratic side, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (the first woman and the first black to have a realistic shot at the nomination) and former Senator John Edwards, the party's Vice-Presidential nominee last time around; on the Republican side, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senator John McCain and former Governor Mitt Romney. I'll talk about them - and some of their rivals - in next Sunday's column.