Feeling super? Super Tuesday, that is. Ten states vote today, with 437 delegates at stake, more than on any other date so far — Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia.
As our US correspondent Guy Rundle writes today from Toledo, Ohio: “Five victories — with Idaho providing an alternative venue to go 50-50 with the other candidates — would make the night Romney’s. Falling below that would be nightmare afresh for the GOP.”
The exit polls coming in as Rundle writes show that Gingrich has taken Georgia, the lead in Ohio is swapping between Santorum (the man refuses to die) and Romney, Paul is showing strong in Vermont and Virginia and Santorum is killing it in Tennessee and Oklahoma. But there’s only 10% of votes counted, and anything is possible.
In the middle of it all, President Obama popped his head up with a mid-afternoon press conference, reminding everyone of the main fight to come. Once again he employed, to quote Rundle, his “… new-found — or judiciously delayed — determination to take the fight to the Right.”
For the wonks who’ll be checking back throughout the afternoon, make sure you consult our pocket guide — what to watch for, and where to go for all the latest updates. Will Mitt Romney smack down Rick Santorum in Ohio? Will Newt Gingrich be relegated to the status of regional candidate with a single-state win in Georgia (and will he wake up)? Can Ron Paul provide an upset in Vermont and Virginia ?
While you’re killing time for answers to all these questions, read all of today’s Rundle, right to the bottom, right to the point where an epiphany on power strikes in a coffee shop in Lorain, at a public appearance by Congressman Dennis Kucinich :
“… as the GOP candidates bluster and strut, and Obama quietly becomes the President, one’s thoughts go back to the bridge at Selma, crossed and recrossed this past half-century. No one knew, that day in 1965, walking into a certain beating, that it would prove the moment when civil rights and America turned on a dime, and the meaning of the country became, to a degree, the civil rights movement. And that is one lesson to take away from that, whether it is standing up on a bridge or talking about the pill at a congressional hearing — you never know what futile gesture will become its opposite and enter history. But there is another lesson too, and that is that, at some point, you have to cross the damn bridge, and power has to be taken, power with all its vicissitudes, and abasements, to stand up, and vanquish people who see no abasement in power. That, as far as I can tell, is what is happening now, and why one feels the blood flow again. All these things I thought, watching a slight man, talking to a half-interested, half curious crowd, in one coffee shop, in one city, in one vast country.”
This is why Crikey readers live for the US election. Rundle on the US election, that is.
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