Golden state compass US elections 2008: Hillary Clinton and John McCain are the powerful front runners in the crucial California primary next week Sasha Abramsky The Guardian Comment is free http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sasha_abramsky/2008/02 /golden_state_compass.html Super-Tuesday - Feberuary 5 - is only a few days away, and the surviving Republican and Democratic candidates are crisscrossing the country in a frantic race for votes. This time, after the hoopla around Iowa and New Hampshire, it is the turn of the big guys. And nowhere is bigger - vote-wise - on either side than California, the crown jewel of the Super Tuesday primary. Suddenly, California is everywhere in the news. Yesterday, Governor Schwarzenegger endorsed McCain's candidacy in Los Angeles. Now, I know the real reason he didn't endorse McCain sooner was that he was going back-and forth between the Arizonan and Giuliani - and now that Giuliani's not in the race, the McCain endorsement becomes a gimme. But I can't help but also feel that Wednesday's presidentail debate must have sealed the deal, making it crystal clear to any and all moderate Republicans that McCain was their man. Listening to that Republican debate from the Ronald Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley ( a bizarre setting for a candidates' forum, with a replica of Air Force One as backdrop to the politicians' seats) Iwas struck by a couple of related thoughts. First, if California's Republican primary voters have any savvy remaining - which I recognize might be a stretch, given their penchant for know-noting politics in recent years- they'll vote for McCain without a second thought. He's an honorable and principled man, even if many of his principles aren't ones I agree with. He's intelligent. He's loathed by the religious right - which is a plus in and of itself; and to my mind he's on the correct side of many important issues, including recognizing the urgent need to tackle global warming. More to the point for California, McCain supports the Golden State's right to impose stricter emissions controls on vehicles - a move recently struck down by the Bush administration- to the fury of Schwarzenegger - and he's open about the economic challenges confronting the country, especially in regions like California, where the housing bubble has burst with a particularly loud bang. My second thought was that Romney, who spent much of his career as a pretty centrist, pragmatic, sort of Republican - the kind who could usher a near universal healthcare system into being in Massachusetts - now appears likely to sell his mother if he thought it would win votes. Translation: if you've got to appease the dingbats at the far right of the GOP in order to do well in the primaries, well then you appease the dingbats. Now that might play in some states, but it ain't going to fly in California. Sure, some Republicans here deride Schwarzenegger for being too centrist. But at the end of the day, over the past two decades it has been the moderate Republicans who have done best in the state. Watching Romney pander to the GOP's conservative base on issues such as immigration and abortion is like watching a particularly painful episode of The Office. As the British would say: what a plonker. More to the point, if you're a conservative Republican, you might see "phony" written all over Romney, and since there's a genuine conservative nutter still in the race, in the form of Mike Huckabee, you go with him come Super Tuesday. And that can only be good news for McCain. Huckabee will take enough votes in desert counties and other conservative enclaves in California to neuter Romney. Meanwhile, McCain will likely win in the heavily populated urban districts, in the regions where GOP voters tend to be more of the Schwarzenegger mould than the Pat Robertson one. If that pattern holds in the other big states voting on Tuesday, come the morning of February 6 to all intents and purposes McCain should be able to settle down to the nine-month slog for the White House. Which brings me to the Democrats, also now a two-person contest. John Edwards' exit had been all-but-inevitable at least since the Nevada caucus. While his ideas have taken off, his candidacy never did in California - at least in part because he was unwilling to go for the big-buck donors so sought after by both Clinton and Obama. After Edwards' speech Wednesday in New Orleans in which he ended his bid for the nomination, several Guardian writers commented on the impact of his ideas on the Democratic campaign. I agree with them. For anyone who's been following politics in America, his presence has been remarkable. I'll repeat what I wrote last wekk: Edwards will never be president, but he would make for a formidable labour secrertary in any incoming Democratic administration. On Super-Tuesday, though, for the Democrats it remains more than likely that February 5 will prove inconclusive. Clinton has been running strong in California, as well as her home state of New York, the latest polls from the west put her more than 10 percentage points ahead of her rival. Even with Edwards out of the race and the possibility that many of his supporters will gravitate towards Obama -thus rendering some of the recent polling out of date - Clinton's machine is formidable enough in California that it should withstand a late Obama surge. The 16% or so of Democratic primary voters who are Latino, who appear to support Clinton heavily, coupled with high profile endorsements from the likes of Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, give her a cushion that Obama can't erode. My guess is she'll win in California and in some of the other big-ticket states, while Obama will emerge the victor in most of the smaller states such as North Dakota. However, since the Democratic primaries award delegates proportionately, win or lose Obama is still going to pick up a substantial number of delegates in California - and he was helped today by the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times, California's largest newspaper. It means that both candidates will still be standing after the votes are tallied. But even if Obama is not the front runner in California, my feeling is that he is the front-runner nationally. After last nights' debate at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, in which both candidates performed extremely well but Obama came off having just a tiny bit more spark, he might conceiviably reduce Clinton's victory in California to a handful of percentage points, picking up enough delegates here to render her win of almost pyrrhic status. And if Clinton can't decisively knock Obama out on Tuesday, as remaining primary state voters start considering which candidate is most capable of taking on Senator McCain, my guess isshe ultimately won't be able to carry the nomination. Obama versus McCain would be a contest not just between these two men but the two most potent political images in the post-world war two American history, between two ghosts with peculiarly long reaches over American politics. Obama is clearly casting himself as heading up a new Camelot, and McCain, despite the reservations of conservatives, will cloak himself in the Gipper's mantle. It would be JFK versus Reagan, the handsome, inspirational, Havard- educated youngster taking on the grizzled, horseback-riding, tax-cutting, tough-talking Westerner. And my prediction for who would win a JFK versus Reagan match-up? Well... let's take one thing at a time. We've got to get through Super Tuesday first. --

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