Spotlight on Kentucky and Oregon

By Kevin Connolly
BBC News, Louisville, Kentucky

This week brought news that archaeologists in the battleground state of Oregon had discovered the remains of cave-dwellers thought to be 14,300 years old - which would mean they died just in time to miss the start of the battle for the 2008 Democratic nomination.

It now seems certain that the race that was meant to be concluded on Super Tuesday in February - remember how that was going to take all the drama out of it - will drag on into next month when the voters of Montana, South Dakota and Puerto Rico will have the last word.

The individual battles that remain - beginning with Kentucky and Oregon - are predictable enough.

Hillary Clinton will win - and win big - here in the Bluegrass State, and Barack Obama will probably enjoy a comfortable victory in the Pacific North West.

Neither result will disturb Mr Obama's now seemingly unstoppable progress to the nomination, but neither will bring the overall race to an end either.

Similar visions

But this is an electoral campaign unlike any other I can remember anywhere in the world - and I'm old enough to have covered "elections" in the old Soviet Union, a one-party state that had to entice voters to the polling stations by using them to distribute cigarettes and chocolate.

Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton have never really offered competing ideological visions of the American future, and the personal differences between his emollience (popular with young people and intellectuals) and her combative style (plays well with her blue-collar constituency) have been debated to a standstill.

No - increasingly, the campaigns are wrangling over rival legal and mathematical interpretations of votes that have already taken place elsewhere.

Republicans - like everyone else - are now assuming that Mr Obama will be the Democratic candidate

So bizarre is the debate, and so complex the dispute that when the voting is over in Kentucky and Oregon we will have the curious spectacle of Mr Obama claiming to have reached an important milestone - a majority of pledged delegates - while Mrs Clinton insists the figures show that more Americans have actually voted for her than for her rival.

Senator Clinton's argument is based on a number of assumptions, mainly the idea that votes cast in the primaries in Florida and Michigan - which have been voided by the party's leadership in a row over the scheduling of their primaries - should be counted in full.

But her supporters are now also arguing that she has done well in states that hold primaries (which are real elections) whereas lots of Mr Obama's victories have come in places that prefer to use caucuses (which are more like informal town hall meetings, and tend to have much lower turnouts).

The Clintons also make the point that some of Mr Obama's support has come in states like Idaho which are certain to vote Republican in November.

So, this argument goes, while it is interesting that Mr Obama wins a debate among the Democrats in a Red State, it will not have any bearing on the outcome of the general election.

Charisma

The truth of the matter is, of course, that if one were to re-run the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton under, say, the rules used by the Republican Party, then she would win by miles - she can after all point to victories in big states like New York, California, Ohio and Pennsylvania, even if Florida is not included.

It is a safe prediction that before campaign 2012 gets under way (will Hillary have another go?) the Democrats will have made substantial changes to their system, so that the candidates will not be left arguing over what the result actually was.

The structure at the moment is designed to be scrupulously fair, but there is no point in having that degree of fairness if the system is neither producing clear results, nor - if the party is unsuccessful in November - selecting the candidate with the best chance of overall victory.

You can assume that these are the kind of arguments that the Clinton camp has been making to super-delegates for weeks now.

The problem for them is that they did not appear to have any of these issues with the rules and procedures when they still thought they were going to win.

And of course even this election is not just about maths and rules.

You might have thought the state of Oregon had come up with just about the least exciting form of election possible (it is done entirely by postal ballot), but when Mr Obama went there at the weekend, he found himself addressing a crowd of perhaps 75,000 in a riverside park, with as many as 15,000 more people locked out.

He has charisma, and he is energising the Democrats, making them believe this is going to be their presidential year, and that is a quality that would not be easy to measure even with a much better system than the one the Democrats have chosen.

If you need proof of Mr Obama's potential, you can find it the way the Republican nominee John McCain is now ignoring Hillary Clinton and focusing his energy on attacking the senator from Illinois on national security issues like how to handle Iran and Hamas.

The message of that, of course, is that Barack Obama has the opposition worried - but more importantly it means that Republicans - like everyone else - are now assuming that he will be the Democratic candidate, however the messy and confusing politics of the next few weeks plays out.