Super Tuesday, Super Bowl

U.S. presidential politics is a full contact sport. It’s a ‘beat ‘em up, drag ‘em down’ contest until there is only one candidate left standing come November. That is what makes Super Tuesday (02/04) such an exciting event for political junkies like me.

Barack Obama is running neck and neck in the polls with his democratic rival Hillary Clinton going into Tuesday’s primaries. This fact alone seemed as improbable as the New York Giants winning the Super Bowl on Sunday (02/03), just a couple of months ago.

Sunday (02/03) saw New York Giants beat the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, the American equivalent of the World Cup (without the ‘world’ taking part). The Giants win was considered an improbable event until just before game time Sunday. The Giants were 12 points underdogs going into the game according Las Vegas bookies. The New York team started out the season by losing their first two games. The heartless New York media called for ‘heads to roll’, including the teams coach, Tom Coughlin. Sunday saw the Giants go to Arizona and beat what was championed as the greatest team assembled in American Football History, the New England Patriots. They had won 18 games coming into the Super Bowl and lost none. They even beat the New York Giants earlier in the season, but narrowly.

Here comes Super Tuesday (02/04) and voters in 24 states will go to the polls in what is touted an unprecedented race for the White House. Republicans and Democrats are expected to vote in huge numbers in influential states like California and New York. The two most populous states with their large delegate count will play the biggest role in choosing the next president of the United States in November.

The only certainty in this election year is that American’s want change. It has yet to be seen whether they want to throw the republicans out of the White House and replace them with democrats, or whether they want to see a new republican face at the presidential helm.

A couple of months ago, the Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama was so far behind his rival, Hillary Clinton in the national polls as to be considered an also ran. A couple wins in the early state primaries later and some key endorsements from Ted Kennedy, the Kennedy patriarch, and celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and he is now running neck and neck going into Super Tuesday, according to the latest polls. (A CBS poll has them both at 41 percent).

On the republican side, John McCain, Tuesday’s republican front-runner, is clearly going into Super Tuesday with what looks like an insurmountable lead over his two rivals, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. A CBS poll has McCain getting 46 percent of the votes compared to Romney’s 23 percent and Huckabee’s 12 percent.

Like Sunday’s improbable Giants Super Bowl win, McCain was considered a ‘goner’ when his campaign hit a road block a couple of months ago. He was in financial difficulty early in the election process. He ended up firing his top political advisors and took to the road on his ‘Straight Talk Express’ campaign bus, instead of the preferred private planes used by the other candidates.

McCain’s resurgence can be linked to the progress made by American troops in quelling the violence in Iraq. McCain is closely linked in the voter’s minds to his support for the unpopular military surge proposed by George Bush. Now that Iraq had faded from media headlines and the surge is perceived by the electorate to be a success, McCain has benefited from his earlier controversial decision to support the surge. Also, it doesn’t hurt that the American economy has taken precedence in voter’s minds, leaving Iraq a distant memory.

The only sure thing about this Tuesday is the New York Giants ticker tater-tape parade down Manhattan’s canyon of heroes. So let the games begin.