Super Tuesday, America's finest hour

Meidyatama Suryodiningrat ,  Cambridge, Massachusetts   |  Fri, 02/08/2008 12:28 PM  |  Headlines

The past two American presidential elections left a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of the public.

The 2000 outcome was decided by a court ruling with the winner actually receiving fewer popular votes than his opponent.

In 2004 the world was left bewildered as Americans re-elected a person who had been globally vilified.

But on Tuesday, or "Super Tuesday" as it is known, we saw the best of democracy at work.

Starting out small in Iowa a month ago, then building up to New Hampshire, the process of vetting candidates exploded Tuesday with some 22 states voting for the Democratic and Republican nominees.

It is a process that engages so many people at different levels of society and is enriched by choices of exciting diversity.

Issues like Iraq, health care, immigration and the economy were important to voters but were not the ultimate decider. The difference in nuances on issues among candidates of the same party are often too subtle for the average voter.

The stance of candidates generally followed party lines: Obama and Hillary want a phased withdrawal from Iraq, while the top three Republican candidates are against a specific timetable. The Democrats support Roe vs. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that upheld a woman's right to chose to have an abortion, while Republicans seek to overturn it.

Values, personal identification and the embodiment of change are what motivates voters.

From the outset, the caucuses and primaries displayed the strength of the grassroots against established front-loading candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, who before the turn of the year had all the momentum and money.

Super Tuesday reinforced this shift.

The Republicans are split between a media-polished former governor (Romney) with little charisma, an aging war hero (John McCain) who is the Democrats' favorite Republican, and a Baptist preacher (Mike Huckabee) whose spokesman, action star Chuck Norris, appears daily on late-night TV peddling exercise equipment.

For a while it seemed Romney had everything going for him, not least, according to the Federal Election Commission data, US$90 million in campaign funds, double McCain's and 10 times more than Huckabee.

But since the Iowa Caucuses something did has failed to click with Republican voters. Super Tuesday affirmed Romney's downward trend while confirming McCain as the Republican frontrunner.

Romney, who still has doubters over his Mormon faith, will also be especially aggravated by Huckabee, who is winning over conservative Republicans as the preacher takes Bible Belt states like Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama.

On the Democratic side, the "skinny black kid with a strange name" (Barack Obama) is catching the steely former first lady (Hillary).

If Obama's campaign account can match Hillary's $118 million in receipts, the Democratic nomination will enter a war of attrition which will prolong the race until the Democratic National Convention in late August.

Ultimately, the implications of Super Tuesday were decided by the differing voting mechanisms adopted by the two parties. Republicans generally prescribe to a winner-take-all formula in which the winning candidate in a certain state takes all the state's delegates.

The Democrats are based on proportional representation. Thus, based on preliminary results, even though Hillary won New York with about 57 percent of the popular vote, Obama with his showing at the polls would still get about 74 of the state's 232 delegates to the convention.

McCain on the other hand carried all 101 Republican delegates in New York while Romney -- who finished second with about 29 percent of the votes compared to McCain's 51 percent -- gets nothing.

With about 800 of the 2,380 Republican delegates already decided, McCain has a healthy lead with nearly 500 delegates, followed by Romney with about 180 and Huckabee with 120. A total of 1,191 delegates are needed for the Republican nomination.

Hillary has about a 100-delegate lead over Obama. But her 660 or so delegates are still far from the required 2,025 needed for nomination. With some 2,820 Republican delegates still to be contested, both candidates can still be confident.

In Churchillian fashion, we can only conclude Super Tuesday was the beginning of the end in the Republican nomination, while it is but the end of the beginning for the Democrats.

The author, a staff writer with The Jakarta Post, is studying at Harvard University as a research fellow with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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