It was mid-October 1992, and Bill Clinton led George HW Bush with 16 points in the polls. In the end, Clinton won the elections by 6 points. In 1999, Al Gore led George W Bush 51 to 40 points in at least one poll. In 1973, Jimmy Carter led Gerald Ford in one poll by 13 points; Carter finally won by just 2.

All this is meant to convey one message: Democrats, don’t you get your hopes up too much just yet.

This race is going to tighten to microscopic margins, and John McCain might yet win.

That’s why Barack Obama’s campaign is pushing people to vote early, and vote now, while Obama is still high up in the polls. This is especially the case in Ohio, where the Democratic state leadership has done everything it can, within the confines of the law, to allow early voting everywhere — especially in districts which in 2000 and 2004 were very close, and which narrowly went for Bush.

And Obama’s campaign just might have learned something from Tom Bradley’s campaign for governor of California, in 1982. The Bradley Effect is named after him — but for the wrong reasons. The Bradley Effect, in my book at least, had everything to do with motivation and early voting, not with racism.

Tom Bradley led his white Republican counterpart in the polls by a wide margin, but in the end lost. Many to this day wrongly say that it was racism that led white people to say to pollsters that they were going to vote for Bradley, while in the end, they voted for the white candidate.

Not so.  Closer examination of the polls leading up to the election in hindsight showed Bradley’s lead narrowing significantly. In the end, Bradley’s lead had evaporated to just 45-44.  He then lost the election because of early voting; Republican voters simply were more motivated than their complacent Democratic counterparts, and they went out to vote early in massive numbers, precisely because Bradley was out-polling their favourite candidate.

This is the Bradley Effect the McCain is now banking on. Team McCain is hoping that the strong polling numbers of Obama will motivate McCain voters to go out to vote early.

Team Obama is trying to do two things at once: dilute the Bradley Effect, and gain the upper hand in the process while he is still leading McCain in the polls.

And that’s smart thinking by people who seem to know their campaigns history. Election Night on November 4 will tell who outsmarted who. This fight could still go either way.

Back from my holidays in Morocco and Spain (it was fun, thank you – we sorta followed the ‘Moorish Trail’), and lo and behold! Barack Obama no longer seems to be in the lead. As the electoral college polls over at the (pro-GOP) Realclearpolitics.com and (more neutral) Fivethirtyeight.com websites show, John McCain has closed the gap. Obama needs to get worried.

The reasons why Obama is losing? It ain’t rocket science:

1. He has not been able to convince voters that he’s made of the right stuff.
2. People doubt him.
3. He’s black. (Well, sorta.) Which doesn’t help, not in the USA anyway.
4. They’re Americans; they can’t handle the truth!

In short, the four reasons that have been toiling in the back of my head ever since Obama became the Democratic candidate-in-waiting.

It also proves another thing: The Media have blown Obama’s candidacy way out of proportion. While the M Crowd was busy salivating over a black presidential candidate, they completely seemed to miss out on the fact that, according to the polls, many voters didn’t share their blinding enthusiasm.

There were some political junkies in the national press corps who were largely able to keep their Obamania-levels low. Kudos to Ben Smith and Glenn Rush, both of Politico.com, Mark Halperin of Time’s The Page, and Jake Tapper, the main man of ABC’s Political Punch.

Okay, so what’s next? It’s going to be Obama week, all week. First, he announces his pick for the veep slot. Sure, he might have offered it to Hillary, like even Ralph Nader predicted – but what, Bubba, if she turned it down, with an eye on 2012….?

Questions, questions. Anyway, Obama will be announcing his pick, which is sure to lead to at least 48 hours of Obamanews. Watch for nasty attacks from right-wing quarters, in an effort to divert Obama’s limelight.

Then, after the veep announcement, the Democrats will hold their convention. Yet another 72 hours (or so) of across the board Obamanews. Watch for nasty… Oh well, you get the drill.

Will it result in a bounce for Obama? Nope. Yes, he’ll give a grandiose speech and The Media will remind you for several days how incredibly special it is to have the First Black Candidate for the presidency, and that it’s history being made, etcetera, and so on.

But because of reasons 1, 2, 3 and 4, the bounce – if there is one at all – will be minimal. If Obama doesn’t close the deal before the end of September, the Clinton Wolfpacks will smell blood. Obama’s shining light will fade, especially if McCain does manage a small bounce.

Because then The Media’s big story will be “John McCain, The Comeback Grandpa”. And that would constitute Reason 5.

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” shouted John Lydon, singer of The Sex Pistols, at the end of their last (real) gig. One can only wonder how many Americans wake up each morning, and feel that somehow they’ve been cheated as well. Millions of them grew up with mom and dad telling them they work, and work hard, they could make quite a decent living for themselves. What are the moms and dads of today telling their kids as they load up the U-Haul trailers, to move away from the house they can no longer afford?

Let’s face it. Let’s be honest about it, for once. There actually are millions of Americans who have to work two – or sometimes even three – jobs just to pay for the rent or the mortgage, and the daily costs of living. And now many of them, who were told by their banks that they could get a huge mortgage for almost no money, find out that even all that work isn’t enough.

So what’s going on?

In simple terms: life has simply gotten too expensive in the land of the free market economy. There, I’ve said it; you can exhale now. Yes, for many Americans the free market economy isn’t working. But hold on, wasn’t that market economy supposed to be this fantastic paradise, which would benefit everyone?

Well, no. A free market economy does not benefit everyone. You need proof? How about this: approximately 35 to 40 million Americans are not able to pay for their medical needs. They haven’t been for years. Millions more are barely able to, and these are the people who were working two jobs and had the killer mortgage. They’ll soon be joining the ranks of the medically uninsured.

These people are now getting pretty pissed off. They were always told that, if they worked hard, bread would fall from the skies. Now all they get from the daily news are statistics about forced home sales, foreclosures and free market gurus who are calling them “whiners”.  (Phil Gramm, the door’s right over there and your coat’s the one with the bullseye painted on the back.)

People like Phil Gramm – i.e. your average, out-of-touch, Grand Old Party fat cats – have been praying at the altar of the free market for decades, and when the going gets tough and someone smacks them against the forehead with a frying pan that holds a sign that reads, “it’s a failure, you schmuck!”, the only thing they can belch out is, “errr… More free market…?”

When confronted with statistics about the people who are forced to foreclose on their homes because they can no longer pay their sub-prime mortgages, Grammites (let’s call ‘em that, shall we?) say that it was all their own fault. That they couldn’t afford those mortgages and that they shouldn’t have taken them out in the first place. “They should have been sensible!”

All well and good, but there’s a problem with that argument.

It were the Grammites who said, no – demanded that the American Dream exists, and that it consists of having Your Own Big Home. The Grammites told the very people they are scolding nowadays to take out loans and buy a house, because it helped the economy. Grammite Alan Greenspan was ready to help, lowering the interest rates. Mortgage rates followed suit.

The Grammites were the ones who called the smart people ‘Trailer Trash’. People who could have gone for the cheap sub-prime mortgages, but who didn’t, and who elected to stay in their cheap trailer homes. I’m sure that a lot of them are laughing hard.

At the same time, the Grammites yelped that worker’s salaries were too high, that wage costs prevented US companies from competing with lower wage countries like China. Of course, the Grammites were also the shareholders who demanded of CEOs that they move production facilities to China, but that’s a different story.  (Or so they say, anyway.)

Perhaps the Grammites should have been honest. Perhaps they should have been clear and tell The People that the way things were going, people should get used to…a lower standard of living.

Because in a free market economy, there are winners and losers. It’s part and parcel of the system. No matter where you go, no matter where you look, in each society that employs a free market system, there are winners and losers. It’s not just haves and have-nots politics, like the kind George W Bush advocates. Winners and losers are part of the free market core.

And of course, the Grammites knew this. That’s why they started telling people that it was perfectly okay to live on borrowed money. They had to; it was the only way to keep alive the illusion of the free market economy.

How ironic. The last leaders of the Soviet Union tried that for their model, too, just before the Soviet Union broke up.

Russia, by the way, is a prime example of a Winners and Losers society. Russia had a pure free market economy for some 15 years. “Free market shock therapy”, the Grammites who advised the Russian leadership called it. But it only brought the Russians the market economy in extremis; if you have something to sell, you’re alright. If you don’t, you’re in deep doo-doo.

If America’s leading politicians would unleash that kind of free market “shock therapy” on the American people today, there would be civil war tomorrow.

So is this blog advocating socialism, then? No, but it evidently also isn’t advocating the kind of anarchist free-for-all that is the vanilla free market economy. It’s alright to have such a system, of course, as long as there are more winners than losers. The calculating career politician in a democratic system, though, should pay heed to statistics that show expanding numbers of losers, while the winners’ demographic is shrinking.

The Western European model also isn’t a paradigm. Daily costs of living are rising fast on the European continent, too. Like each living person on any patch of this world, except perhaps for the tribal hunters in villages in the Amazon or Papua New Guinea, Europeans too are paying much more money for fuel, energy and food than they were a year ago.

The only difference between the Western European model and the more individualist, corporate-anarchist model in the US is that the blows do not yet land as hard in Europe. That’s because of the existing social safety nets, borne out of an ideal of solidarity. They act as air bags in a car.

But those models are already under pressure too.  Social security is arranged through governments and the money needed to pay for it is harvested through a progressive, accumulative system of taxes. The more you earn, the more you’re taxed.

Higher costs for just about everything are forcing governments to cut benefits, while at the same time keeping the influx of money the same. At the same time, costs of living that are not part of the social security and medical insurance system are rising. Fuel and food costs, for example, are going through the roof.

So middle class people see their governments cut down on the social and medical security benefits, but not bringing down tax levels, while on the other end of the costs spectrum, they’re also bleeding money. Those people have no say in the costs of a cucumber or a gallon of gasoline, but they can vote for a political party that promises to slash taxes. And those parties are getting increasingly popular all over Europe these days.

The problem is that the system of solidarity still stands the best chance for everybody. Yes, benefits can be expensive and yes, there will always be abuse. But it is simply a choice between everybody chipping in a bit to help out everyone, thereby keeping the costs per individual relatively low, or a system in which the winners pay a lot of money for their own social security, while leaving the losers out to rot on the street.

Czar Nicolas II, the last ruler of Imperial Russia, would nowadays probably advise anyone not to opt for the second choice. He did once, and he ended up with a bullet in his forehead outside a daft farm in Siberia.

So is the free market economy all that bad? Well, no. It has also brought us good things. Hopefully, the shortage of oil and the subsequent quadrupling of prices will really kick-start a new industry of non-polluting energy.

The free market is good for something. It just needs to be contained, and it certainly isn’t the harbinger of good fortune.

[youtube:www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE&feature=related]

Hillary Clinton is going to lose the nomination battle. If not the delegates, then most certainly the Democratic ‘hearts and minds’. Should she win the battle, it will be because what Obama did and got was too little, too late. But once the Democratic convention comes rolling along in 6 months, most Dems won’t want her to lead the party into battle with the Republicans — even if she’s got most delegates. However, it may not even come to that; Obama is getting a LOT of traction as his momentum keeps building, and he just might be able to tip the scale. Clinton may win New York, but if Obama wins California, then that will be the ‘watershed moment’ Team Clinton won’t be able to explain away, much less spin. Then it will be over.

And guess what? Zogby et al are already polling an Obama win in California.

He’ll never admit it until the proper time comes — which could be any time of his choosing — but John Edwards in the back of his mind must know by now that he’s not going to win the nomination to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for the US presidency in 2008. In Iowa, New Hampshire and even South Carolina, Edwards has fallen back to third place in the polls. If he comes in third in Iowa, his entire strategy will have failed and he will have no other option than to drop out. And so the $1 million question then is: who will John Edwards endorse? Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?

As I write this, pundits seem to be missing that Edwards’s star appears to be fading, blinded as they are by focusing entirely on the brutal violence of the Clinton-Obama battles, which obviously makes for good headlines. By doing so, they are missing out on the one factor that is likely to decide the Democratic Party’s nomination: the approximately 10 to 15% of the Democratic primary and caucus Edwards-votes that would be up for grabs by either Clinton or Obama, should the former Senator from North Carolina decide to give in.

His campaign will deny it until the very last second of the Iowa caucus, but as January 3 comes closer the issue will slowly but surely be pushed to the forefront. There’s a big chance that Edwards will come in not second but third in Iowa, and the polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina do not look very good either. There’s an equally big chance he will lose in those two states as well, and since his campaign was obviously based on coming in on top in Iowa, where he has been campaigning virtually non-stop since 2004, the loss in Iowa is likely to destroy his entire nomination campaign.

When that happens, Edwards has two choices. Either stay in the campaign, knowing that after losing in Iowa, the press will ignore him completely as they focus even more on ‘Clinton versus Obama’. In fact, chances are that he will move to the back pages of the newspapers, amid the Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse freakshow. His ego won’t be able to stand much of that ridicule, which will also virtually guarantee that he stands no chance of getting the vice-president nod from whoever wins the nomination. (Edwards isn’t coveting that position anyway.)

So the second, only rational and face-saving choice would be to throw the hat into the ring almost immediately after the Iowa caucus results come in (providing, of course, that he finishes third) and thus before the New Hampshire primary, which is held 2 days after the Iowa caucus. And if he does, then the question is whether Edwards will endorse another candidate. As Joe Biden, Bill Richardson and Christopher Dodd are seen dropping out quite quickly after their Iowa loss as well, it stands to reason that Edwards will have to choose between Obama and Clinton. Who of the two is he likely to endorse?

It is no secret that the Clintons have always held somewhat of a special place in their calculating hearts for Edwards; if anything, they were closer to him than to Obama. Bill Clinton has at times hinted that he backed John Edwards more than he did John Kerry during the presidential campaign of 2004 and there is no reason to think that Edwards has forgotten about that support. Naturally the Edwards and Clinton campaigns have traded barbs every now and then in the run-up to the nomination campaign of this cycle, but these were more superficial than anything hard-hitting.

However, despite those warm feelings for each other, one of Edwards’s nomination campaign themes has been ‘change’, not ‘continuity’ in the shape and form of extending the Clinton dynasty. So in that respect, and when purely looking at Edwards’s platform, perhaps a choice for Obama instead of Clinton would be more logical for Edwards. But then Edwards’s platform places much more emphasis on the ‘One America’ theme, invoking the image of an increasingly deeper rift between the rich and the poor, which (until recently) wasn’t one of Obama’s main platform themes.

Perhaps the answer lies in the kind of voters Edwards is popular with. Edwards has always been trying to reach out to unions and voters in the lower to lower-midde-class income brackets. His target audience therefore has a lot of overlap with Clinton’s, whose campaign has also been reaching out to unions and other representative organisations. Another target audience is women, which are quite obviously also a Clinton target. Another main overlapping theme that recently attracted voters to the Edwards camp was his plan for a national health insurance, which looks more like Clinton’s plan than Obama’s. Edwards has also criticised Obama’s plan more than he has Clinton’s.

But even though there is a lot of overlap, there is also a reason why so many people have been rooting for Edwards ever since Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy: a lot of Edwards voters simply don’t like Clinton. More often than not, Edwards voters are disgusted at the idea of having to vote for Clinton during the national election. Still, though, if they don’t want a Republican taking the White House again, they know they’ll have to as regardless of what polls and pundits are saying now, chances are that the presidential election is going to be very, very close again, just like in 2000 and 2004. If Edwards himself then implores them to vote for Clinton durong the nomination process, it might just be enough to decisively tilt the balance in her favour.

However, regardless of all these rational parameters, the decision lies entirely with Edwards personally. It is the second time that he is seeking presidential office, first as the Democratic vice-president nominee and now as a candidate for the top job. Losing out once is painful, losing twice is a disaster in political terms, not just because of the loss of face in the public arena (resulting in a lot less support should he ever try to run for president again), but perhaps even more because of the sense of personal failure.

If and when he gets to take a decision, he will know from private polls provided by his campaign that some of his voters in the last weeks of the Iowa campaign moved to the Obama-camp because of the ‘Anybody But Clinton’-vote that holds sway among the more leftist Democratic activists, and the inevitable ‘Oprah-mojo’ of the Obama campaign. Yet some of his voters will also have crossed the bridge (back) to the Clinton camp — the voters that are afraid that Obama is indeed too unexperienced to stand up to the Republican Character Assassination Machine in a national election.

And when deciding whether he should take a decision at all, there is another factor that will certainly be on his mind, which is: securing an important role in the Democratic party in the future. Edwards is someone who thrives in the spotlight; it’s a gene he seems to share with Bill Clinton. By simply accepting defeat and walking away, he will also walk out of many people’s minds, forever tainted as a loser.

The mere thought is anathema to Edwards. He understands that making a choice for one of the two candidates will at least ensure him a spot in the Democratic pantheon and who knows, perhaps he will be invited for an important position in Obama’s or Clinton’s administration. If not that, then White House support while running for governor of North Carolina would certainly help.

With all that in mind, and looking at the national polls in which Clinton still has a double-digit lead over Barack Obama in the nomination process and also leads possible Republican opponents in most polls, Edwards would be hard-pressed to give the nod to Obama instead of Clinton.