With his fixed grin – fixed it must be said by the Vietcong – and his lucky sweater, John McCain moves between the assembled ranks of the faithful in Sumter’s dusty town hall, always conscious of where he stands in relation to the camera, his stiff pose suggestive to many of heroism, to me more redolent of Wallace without the Gromit. Lucky sweater, wrong trousers? “We can revive America” he breathes into the microphone, looking older than on TV, his skin thin as tissue paper “but some of your jobs are not coming back”.

It’s the line he was running in Michigan, and he’s running it again in “backcountry” South Carolina, a place dependent on king cotton before and after slavery, and now hit hard by the rise of global fabrics. It’s a place of rusting old towns which have missed out on the tourist boom that hit the “low country” coastal areas in the last 20 years – chi-chi-Charleston, and uber resorts like Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach.

McCain should be dead in the water here, with the charge of being soft on illegal immigration sticking to him, but he’s getting traction ahead of Saturday’s Republican primary. Romney’s skipped the state entirely, his Mr Fixit rhetoric too unbelievable for the SC textile industry, and Huckabee – whose itinerary seems to consist entirely of steakhouses – who is cutting with the grain.

Indeed, so much of a threat is he now that the real dirt is coming out – ie. a leaflet asking questions about what he did during his six years in an NV prison, suspicions premised on his involvement in ending the US-Vietnam embargo in the 90s. The impact is nothing like the “swift boats” stuff against Kerry – since that connected easily with Kerry’s anti-war stance – but a measure of the high stakes.

Speaking of easy segues, the Nevada caucus has become a real crap shoot – ie. incomprehensible rules and dubious odds. A judge has just thrown out a legal challenge filed by pro-Clinton members of the local Teachers Union against the practice of workplace caucuses – nine caucus sites located in casinos, so that workers can actually attend to vote – and which, for reasons beyond all but about six Nevada political fixers, will elect five times the delegates than other caucuses.

The court challenge argued that the casino caucus sites Saturday night will give the roughly 200,000 workers on the Las Vegas strip an unfair advantage over other voters who have to work that night. The 60,000-member Nevada Culinary Workers Union (CWU) support the workplace caucuses, and they also happen to back Barack Obama.

Edwards has a lot of rank and file support (whether that will materialise in an open caucus remains to be seen), and the Clintons are going in hard. The meaningless media moment of the day was Bill Clinton having a senior moment at a reporter regarding the nature of the lawsuit – mild irritation which got played over cable like it was a big green Hulk moment.

Much has been made of the drive by all candidates to try and get in the Hispanic vote, focused on the CWU. In fact it is impossible to tell whether what they are really is the vote on race lines, or service workers as a class delivered en masse, for the groups are pretty substantially overlapping. Two thousand people a week move to Vegas, most of those seeking kitchen/waitering work and their concerns tend to be more class than identity-based. Even Obama’s two most recent ads directed towards Hispanics were largely focused on the universal issues of health care, rather than on any core appeal to the coloured experience. But doubtless all candidates are somewhere, even now, eating burritos for the cameras.

For the GOPs, Nevada is yet another life or death moment for Romney, with Huckabee running a strong second behind Wallace. If Romney is pushed into third in Vegas and again in SC, then he is surely gone.

And if Edwards can win it, or come a very close second, then he has his one shot at a good enough showing at big Tuesday to be a contender. Stranger things have happened. Sadly not very bloody often. Obama meanwhile, is already positioning himself for the actual campaign proper – “noting that he wanted to be a transformation president, as Ronald Reagan, but not Bill Clinton, was.” Ars-hole, yes, but also biyatch.

One of the strangest moments of the campaign so far actually occured last year on the Jay Leno show, when the musical act was the Sex Pistols, looking as tired as an old sock – yet still with enough clout for the guest of the night to scurry across the stage and shake their hands. The guest? Ron Paul, maverick “libertarian” candidate currently running at around 6%.

Paul knew his audience – the mix of right and left wingers, many of them young, attracted to his slightly punky libertarian message, combining opposition to all foreign wars, with a desire to abolish most governmental institutions of the United States.

M’esteemed colleague Jeff Sparrow last year noted that Paul, like Pauline Hanson, appealed to contrarians without much concern for content but with a certain nostalgia for a time that never was.

I thought the comparison was overblown at the time, but the subsequent tracking back through the thousands of newsletters Paul has sent out over the years shows it to be right on the money. The New Republic broke the story last week, noting that the newsletters – with various titles such as “Ron Paul’s Freedom Report” – are filled with outright racist attacks on blacks (“animals”, “degenerates”), attacks on gays who were trying to “poison the blood supply with AIDS”, speculation that Mossad was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing and much much more.

In the ensuing uproar, Paul defended himself, saying he’d never written the (unsigned) articles – most likely many of them were by “paelo-libertarian” Lew Rockwell, part of the rich undergrowth of American hard right. Rockwell has denied this, but comparison with his other writings makes him the likely culprit.

Whoever actually penned them, the articles have blown a hole in Paul’s appeal as a cross-faction opponent of the status quo. His appeal was always strongest to the weakest minds on either side, and leftists who supported him – they’re running a 60s style campaign in SC with a Ron Paul rEVOLution blimp flying the state – are twisting and turning to find a way to continue supporting him.

His popularity was always an expression of desperation among those looking for an alternative – now it looks like a step backward for the notion that there is one.