Seventeen months before polling day for the 2008 presidential election in the United States, the scene is more chaotic and harder to predict than for many decades. The result, at this early stage, is impossible to predict with any confidence. The George W Bush administration is extraordinarily unpopular, but it does not follow that the Democrats are sure of victory in 2008. Here are three reasons, other than the normal twists of the political world, for that statement:
▪ For years many political scientists have dreamed of a "national primary". In seven months' time, America will be closer to that than ever before. At least twenty states, and perhaps many more, will hold primary elections or caucuses on 5 February 2008. That means the parties' choice of presidential candidates, usually not final until the summer of an election-year, will be virtually decided before the spring.
▪ The states holding early primaries include California, Florida, Texas and New Jersey - all with big populations and more than one television advertising "market". That means that candidates would have to spend money in at least forty markets.
Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent.
Among his books are The World Turned Right Side Up: a history of the conservative ascendancy in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1996); The Gentleman from New York: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the new century (Princeton University Press, 2006)
Among Godfrey Hodgson's openDemocracy articles on American politics:
"Can America go modest?" (October 2001)
"After Katrina, a government adrift" (September 2005)
"Oil and American politics" (October 2005)
"The death of American politics" (October 2005)
"The next big issue: inequality in America" (13 September 2006)
"America against itself" (19 February 2007)
"Democracy in America: the money trap" (27 March 2007)
"Queen Elizabeth meets President George" (9 May 2007)
"The lost leader" (27 June 2007)Some analysts think that is impossible. But others calculate that candidates will have to raise unprecedented sums to cover as many markets as possible. Already Senator Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, has raised an enormous campaign chest. Her nearest rival, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, has shown that he can come closing to matching and even exceeding Clinton's fundraising; he has raised an overall total of $55.7m (£27.9m), and his campaign team revealed on 1 July (to meet the latest Federal Election Commission deadline for submission of reports) that the candidate had collected $32.5m (£16.2m) in April-June 2007 - ahead of Hillary Clinton's $27m (£13.5m) in the same period. These leading candidates, even if they cannot cover all states holding primaries in February, can each be expected to spend far more than any of their predecessors. Republicans will spend at least as much.
▪ On 25 June 2007, the Supreme Court (by a five-four majority) relaxed the rules on campaign spending. In 1974, the court held that buying TV ads at election time was a form of speech, and therefore protected by the first amendment to the United States constitution, which says Congress may make no law limiting freedom of speech. Now the court says that advocacy groups financed by labour or corporate money cannot run ads for individual candidates, but they can run ads promoting issues for a month before primary and two months before general elections. That augurs heavier spending.
▪ Michael Bloomberg, the popular mayor of New York, is seriously thinking of running as an independent candidate for the presidency. Bloomberg, a former Salomon Brothers banker and the owner of the Bloomberg financial newswire service, is a billionaire who could afford to subsidise his own campaign from his own resources. He announced on 19 June that he was no longer a Republican. In reality, he was a Democrat before he ran for mayor, and his views are in many ways closer to those of centrist Democrats such as Senator Clinton.
If Bloomberg does run, he can be expected to take more votes from the Democratic candidate than from the Republican. As a successful third-party candidate, Bloomberg could have as big an impact as Ross Perot, who took enough votes from the Republican, George HW Bush in 1992 to allow Bill Clinton to be elected.
The Iraq factor
These three separate developments guarantee an exceptionally intense and unpredictable campaign. They do not yet point to any definite conclusion about the result. Too much can and will happen between now and early November 2008.
However, a prudent handicapper would at least conclude that the turnover of power from the Republicans to the Democrats, which most observers thought inevitable after the mid-term elections of 2006, is far from a certainty. There are two reasons for this.
First, Republicans are normally able to raise and spend more money than Democrats. The gap is not as wide as some might imagine. But it is nevertheless significant in most elections. So, at least theoretically, the prospect of a campaign in which spending is likely to be even heavier than in recent years would seem to favour the Republicans.
Second, the Democrats may be losing some of the boost they received from the growing unpopularity of the Iraq war. The war remains unpopular, and the Bush administration shares that unpopularity. The administration is trying to push forward into 2008 and even further decisions about whether or not to withdraw most American troops and what presence to maintain in Iraq.
General David Petraeus, the brainy commander who was put in charge after the president rejected advice from the Baker-Hamilton commission to cut force levels, said at first he would decide in September 2007 whether the "surge" of additional American troops has worked or not. Now he and other American generals are hedging their bets, hinting that they will need more time to judge the success or otherwise of the surge.
So the Iraq war, and specifically the question of whether or not to withdraw most American troops, will now definitely be a burning issue in the weeks leading up to the new (and nearly national) primary in February 2008.
Again, that might seem to help the Democrats, and in fact it may turn out to do so. But that, too, is now uncertain, for a highly interesting reason: that while the Bush administration is now desperately unpopular, the Democrats, who now control Congress, are almost equally low in the polls.
Immediately after the mid-term elections in November 2006, there was a vast public expectation that the congressional Democrats would be able to use the power of the purse to turn off the tap and force the president to pull back most of the troops. But while the Democrats have slim majorities in both houses of Congress, they do not come close to the 60% that is required to override a presidential veto.
That may change. If the mayhem and chaos continues in Iraq, with rising monthly totals of American casualties and high numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths, some Republicans might decide to consult their consciences and vote with the Democrats to override any veto. One or two prominent Republicans, notably Senator Richard Lugar, former chairman of the Senate foreign-policy committee, have already broken with the White House line on Iraq. If an admired conservative, such as Senator John Warner of Virginia - chairman of the Senate armed-services committee until November 2006 - were to do the same, that might punch a hole in the dyke. But such an outcome is far from certain.
A flip-flop period
In the meantime, the voters seem to be disappointed by the Democrats. The Democrats are divided. They have been unable to deliver the one big political change the electorate most wants. Just as in the case of Vietnam in the 1970s, the opposition to the war is made up of two very different currents of opinion. There are those who think the war is wrong in principle, and those who think it is not worth the price in lives, money and humiliation. So the Democrats need to appeal both to those who oppose the war on moral grounds and those for whom it is just a mess.
Moreover, the Republicans will go into the 2008 election with some cards in their hands. Senator Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' most likely candidate, voted for the war, as did most other members of the Senate and the House of Representatives. She has not shifted her ground. But that makes her vulnerable to the charge that she has "flip-flopped".
There is, too, a bizarre precedent from the 2004 campaign that should make loyal Democrats think twice. That is the Swift-boat affair. The Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry, was a much-decorated Vietnam veteran, considered a hero for his bravery in Swift boats, light craft that chased Vietnamese guerrillas on the Mekong and other rivers.
President Bush avoided service in Vietnam by joining the air national guard, a sort of territorial air force. Vice-president Dick Cheney received five draft deferrals. In any normal calculation, Kerry's war record should have prevented the Republicans so much as raising the issue of his military credentials.
Yet George W Bush's political maestro, Karl Rove, orchestrated a campaign that suggested that Kerry's record was bogus, while keeping the White House's fingerprints from the process. When a TV show tried to challenge the president's service record, and made mistakes, Rove and his political pitbulls turned the whole issue around, until it was Kerry defending his war record, and George W Bush serenely ignoring any questions about his own.
This was a replay of 1972, when the Republican Richard M Nixon, who spent the war playing poker far from harm's way in the Pacific, successfully challenged the patriotism and courage of the Democrat, George McGovern, who had flown almost three dozen dangerous bombing raids over Nazi-occupied Europe.
This is not intended to be a prediction of a Republican victory in 2008. At the same time, all things considered, I am not yet ready to put a bet on the Democratic candidate, whoever she, or he, turns out to be.