THE SYSTEM (or All You Need to Know About the US Primaries but Weren't Interested Enough to Find Out) THIS time next year, in the USA, things will be hotting up in the last stage of the contest for the Presidency. One of two people will be within sight of becoming the head of state and head of government and commanderin-chief of the armed forces of 302 million American people.

Unless something totally weird happens, the fight will be between the candidate who'll have been nominated by the Democratic party . . . the relatively liberal, relatively sociallyconscious party . . . and the candidate of the Republican party, which is more conservative, and would claim to favour less government and more personal enterprise.

How do those two candidates get chosen? Well, they emerge from a series of state-wide local elections . . . the primaries. The process is slightly different in different places, but basically, registered members of the two parties, state by state, will vote early next year to indicate which candidate from within their own party they want their state to back.

Eventually, one candidate will have more backing, USA-wide, than any other, and that candidate . . .
after being acclaimed at the party's convention . . .will go on to fight for the presidency. It's a system developed before there were mass media, and it means that, in the words of a commentator, "the fate of this vast continent-sized place with its gigantic sophisticated cities and coastal megalopolies is decided by a handful of cloth caps and farmers and hermits in places like New Hampshire and Iowa. . ."

But that's how it's done.

And the prize is bigger than even the biggest challenges America faces. I step past the bivouacs of homeless people when I go out from my room in Manhattan these mornings, and I walk past headlines about Iraq. Still, a president of the United States plays the lead in one of humanity's few success stories. This is the country that has delivered, in all history, the greatest number of happy lives to the greatest number of beings.

THE PERSONALITIES

But that's not why I've signed up for cable television and bought a little sofa to sit on to watch political programmes for the next 100 days (states are jostling for the attention and money the earliest voters get, and the Democrats in Florida say they're having their primary on 29 January. ) I'm fascinated by the candidates; simple as that.

If you put them in a soap opera critics would say they're too improbable to take seriously. Name a button and somewhere here there's a candidate who presses it. There's showbiz (Fred Thompson), 11 September (Giuliani), suffering (John McCain), wealth beyond imagining (Mayor Bloomberg of New York will spend a billion of his own money if he runs), romance (John Edwards' wife, with Stage Four breast cancer, is using what may well be her last months to campaign for him with frightening zeal), religion (Mitt Romney is the first ever Mormon presidential candidate, race (Barack Obama is coming nearer than any person of colour to a presidential candidacy), and, of course, gender.

Hillary Clinton is, this week, in position to become the leader of the free world. No one . . .except the Clintons . . . can ever have imagined such a thing, and even they must have lost heart when she blew healthcare reform, when their enemies looked as if they might get somewhere with the Whitewater 'scandal', and when the Monica Lewinsky affair put their partnership under extreme strain.

She's ahead in the polls, both for the Democratic nomination and for the general election, where it's assumed that Rudy Giuliani will be her opponent. But maybe she's out too soon, like a certain kind of race horse?

"What could go wrong?" I asked Susan Estrich, lawyer, professor, feminist advocate, political operative, commentator for Fox News and author of, among other books, The Case for Hillary Clinton.

"Something could come out, " she said after a pause.

"About Hillary?"

"No."

"About Bill?"

Silence.

"But then, " she said, brightening up . . . "something is very likely to come out about Giuliani, too."

See? A soap opera.

THE REPUBLICANS

Rudy Giuliani is the frontrunner for the Republicans. He's the son of an Italian-American who was convicted of felony assault and robbery and served time in Sing Sing, and after his release became a Mafia enforcer for his brother-in-law, who ran a loan-sharking and gambling operation in a restaurant in Brooklyn. But Rudy became a prosecutor and put away quite a few of his father's kind of person. He became a dynamic Mayor of New York . . . one of a series of mayors who helped bring the city back from ruinous criminality. And with the strength and emotional simplicity of his response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he became a national and international hero . . . he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth . . . and a rich man.

"We need some kind of avant-garde theory, " New Yorkmagazine said, "to cope with the anomaly of Giuliani" as a Republican candidate. Meaning that he's not what you'd call an ideologue . . . as his mother put it, "Rudy's still sorry for the poor."

And the evangelical Christians who accounted for 40% of the votes cast for George W Bush can't be happy with Giuliani's once-upon-a-time prochoice stance and support for gay rights. And he has lived a turbulent private life in public . . . his second wife, for instance, the mother of the son and daughter who do not speak to him, saw him announce on television that they were divorcing, which was news to her.

This week, in the middle of a gun-loving speech to the National Rifle Association, he answered a call on his mobile. "Hi sweetheart!" he said smoochily, to the amazement of his audience, and proceeded to have a little talk with Judith (third wife, about 12 years younger than he). Judith really loves him. We happen to know that, because Guiliani's divorce lawyer once made a point of announcing that Giuliani's treatment for prostate cancer had left him impotent, making sex with Judith impossible for the first year he was going out with her, when both were still married.

Guns and true love. If there's a country 'n' western vote, Giuliani will rake it in.

He's five points ahead among Republicans of their second favourite, the actor . . . he was the DA inLaw and Order on TV . . . and former Senator, Fred Thompson.

Thompson is a neo-Reagan, presenting himself as an uncorrupted outsider in Washington. But in fact he was a lobbyist before he went to the Senate and worked very lucratively for clients who include some very unattractive firms and individuals, not to mention that he set his son up with a well-paid no-show job. He was even once an advocate for a pro-choice group, which would matter a lot to Christian conservatives if he was actually going to win. But the likelihood is that he'll drop out of the race . . . he's characterised this week by the journalist Dick Morris as having already shown himself, only a few weeks into his campaign, as "ill-informed, inarticulate, badly briefed and downright lazy". Thompson has perhaps the most formidable wife (his third, 25 years younger).

Jeri Thompson is also, perhaps, the most attractive of the many attractive blonde women to hand in these elections. She's commonly referred to as a 'trophy wife' or . . . wistfully, in blogs . . . as being 'too hot' for Washington, but in fact she's a seasoned political consultant to, among others, the Republican National Committee.

Seven points behind Thompson comes Senator John McCain, another maverick as a Republican, though his personal experience of torture when he was a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam, and his commitment to the War on Terror (including Iraq), make him popular beyond the party. John McCain is a survivor of malignant skin cancer and Cindy McCain (second wife, 20 years younger) . . . an outstanding, hands-on philantropist . . . has had to overcome addiction to painkillers, and at one point suffered a stroke. She avoids the media now which, understandable as it is, doesn't help her husband's campaign. Nor does the fact that, if he were elected, he'd be the oldest president ever . . .

older even than Reagan.

At a recent press conference a boy asked McCain whether he was afraid he might die in office if he became president, and he replied, "Thanks for the question, you little jerk. You're drafted."

The mixture of straight talking and charmlessness may explain why he's doing badly as a fundraiser and campaign energiser.

If McCain and Thompson run out of money and disappear, then Mitt Romney . . . now at number four for the Republicans . . . will start shadowing Giuliani, and already Romney's the favourite to win Iowa, the most important of the early primaries. He straightened out the bends in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he's a former Governer of Massachusetts, and he and Mrs Romney and their five children and 10 grandchildren are The Perfect Family compared to almost any other family . . . and especially compared to Giuliani's.

Apart from the fact that they're Mormons.

The one thing most people know about Mormonism is that it believes in one husband, plural wives. Ironically, Mrs Romney is the only one of the Republican frontrunners' wives to be a one-andonly. "The current crop of Republican presidential aspirants, " Michelle Cottle points out in The New Republic, "aren't exactly the sort of guys that Christian conservatives dream of having their daughters marry. Currently, Giuliani and McCain are the acknowledged frontrunners. Toss in another big name conservative being talked about as a contender, Newt Gingrich, and the line-up starts to look even dodgier. It's not simply that Newt, Rudy and McCain are on their third, third, and second wives, respectively. It's that every one of these guys cheated on and dumped their old wives with all the discretion, class, and sensitivity of Donald Trump."

But that doesn't make Cottle any more enthusiastic about Romney's "gameshow-hostness". "A man, " she remarks, "who believes in the restoration of Israel's Ten Tribes and that Zion is preordained to be rebuilt on American soil is one thing. One who uses that much product in his hair is another matter entirely."

THE HISTORIC BREAKTHROUGH

A gossipy, personalised approach to the primaries isn't altogether despicable. Since the candidates on each side belong to the same party, policy differences between them hardly figure. For the present, it's a sense of the nature of the candidate that matters. This makes self-presentation on television immensely important and is the point of the socalled Democratic and Republican contenders' 'debates'.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, first and a distant second in the Democratic race, utterly dominate their debates . . . in the first place, just by not being middle-aged, white men. Last Wednesday, the full slate of Democrats (five of the eight have no chance) went through their paces again, heartily sick of each other though they must be already.

The spread of personality and expertise on offer was truly impressive, but the electrifying thing, watching, was the impression that this Democratic line-up is an agent of a shift towards the future.

Look at what it says about the freedoms of America that Hillary is a female . . . though her mantra, of course, is 'I'm not running because I'm a woman; I'm running because I'm the best qualified person.' And that Obama . . . youngish, and a man of colour . . . is in with a chance of becoming, if not the next president, then a president some day. Of course, he's not very coloured; a Kenyan father and a white mother isn't coloured in the sense that, for example, the people in American ghettoes so alienated that they don't even send their children to school are coloured. But he still represents a breakthrough, and is understandably endorsed by Oprah who never endorsed anyone before. She gave a fundraiser in the vicinity of her $84m, 24-bathroom home in California . . . the invitees weren't actually allowed in the house, though I suppose George Clooney was told to slip in the back door. Mind you, Magic Johnson gave a fundraiser for Hillary. In the very lively blog discussion of these celebrity events, someone remarks acidly that Magic and Hillary already have it in common that he's a husband who cheated on his wife.

Because . . . there's always Bill.

Bill Clinton is both his wife's greatest asset and the greatest danger to her. He helped raise the money for her run, of course. Even now, a 'personal' email from him tells me that: "There are two things in this world that I love more than anything else . . . my family and politics. So you can imagine just how fired up I get when Hillary is on the stage debating the issues that matter to our country. So here's an idea: why don't you and I share that excitement together during an upcoming debate.

Hillary's campaign will pick three people . . . each invited with a guest to watch one of the upcoming presidential debates with me. We'll sit down in front of a big TV with a big bowl of chips, watch the debate, and talk about the race."

All I have to do is send watch-with-Bill a donation. It's tempting.

But can he stick to the role of house husband for a whole more year? As it is, Hillary exudes the calm of the student who goes into an exam satisfied that she's done everything she can to prepare. In the debates, her demeanour makes Obama's intensity seem just a little hysterical. He and the former Senator John Edwards . . . the number three contender after Clinton and Obama in spite of a YouTube clip that shows him fixing his hair at narcissistic length . . . snipe obliquely at her. She doesn't snipe at anyone. She sails along . . . not exciting, not charming, but strikingly competent. Whether that'll be enough to counteract centuries of misogyny we're soon going to find out. Meanwhile, being the frontrunner suits her. This week she wore an unfortunate orange ensemble that had a touch of the Soviet tour guide about it, but she usually wears pink, and tough cookies like herself and Celia Larkin are quite right to wear pink. They can do with softening.

Yet . . . sometimes when the light catches the powdery skin and the sparkle in her eyes just the right way, Hillary looks, as I remarked to Susan Estrich, like a woman who's sexually fulfilled.

Professor Estrich advised me not to go over the top.

MARRIAGE

The candidate who emerges from the primary process will have demonstrated that he or she can not only survive but manage an effort that goes on for two gruelling years . . . an effort which, according to an insider, is more or less designed to break you down. "There's sleep deprivation. And you don't know where your next meal is. You have the same sensory stimuli over and over until it drives you crazy. People are asking you questions, trying to trap you. And you're watched all the time."

But it's not just the public self that is tested. If the thought does occur that an indiscretion of her husband might bring Hillary Clinton down . . .because mightn't more forgiveness look very like opportunism? . . . it highlights the extraordinary importance of marriage in these elections. The marriage relationship . . . as a shorthand description of a person's moral and emotional condition . . . is on display under many aspects, from the pact there must be between the Clintons, to the tragic, classically loyal Elizabeth Edwards, looking more ravaged all the time, tirelessly working as her husband's attack dog, to the Nancy Reagan-like flutterings of the somewhat elderly but nevertheless engaging ingenue, Judith Nathan Giuliani, to the domestic virtuousness of Mr and Mrs Romney.

It is as if the primaries test every single thing about a person, interior as well as exterior. These are the gladitorial games of the modern world. But who will limp in the end to the middle of the arena and raise their arm in victory?

TOTAL CAMPAIGN FUNDS RAISED

DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES

Clinton, Hillary NY $63.1m
Obama, Barack IL $58.9m
Edwards, John NC $23.1m
Richardson, B NM $13.3m
Dodd, Chris CT $12.1m
Biden, Joe DE $6.5m
Kucinich, Dennis OH $1.1m
Gravel, Mike AK $0.2

REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES

Romney, Mitt MA $44.4m
Giuliani, Rudy NY $35.6m
McCain, John AZ $25.3m
Arownback, S KS $3.3m
Paul, Ron TX $3.0m
Tancredo, Tom CO $2.8m
Hunter, Duncan CA $1.4m
Huckabee, Mike AR $1.3m
Thompson, Tom WI $0.9m

TOTAL SPENT (to end of June)

DEMOCRATS

Obama $22,648,832
Clinton $17,849,095
Edwards $9,785,203
Richardson $6,209,949
Dodd $5,697,820
Biden $3,691,828
Kucinich $902,355
Gravel $207,604

REPUBLICANS

Romney $32,310,796
McCain $21,926,631
Giuliani $17,303,045
Brownback $2,861,729
Tancredo $2,209,606
Hunter $1,140,014
Huckabee $873,584
Thompson $768,750
Paul $655,142