Justin Webb's America

Winners and losers

• Justin Webb
• 20 Jan 08, 03:27 AM GMT

The Huckabee concession speech was a stunning attack on Mitt Romney - surely suggestive of a Republican civil war if the eventual choice comes down to Huckabee or McCain against the Michigan winner. Huckabee praised McCain for his "civil and decent" campaign in South Carolina. He did not mention Romney by name but the implication could not have been clearer: that the Mormon business leader has overstepped the mark in his previous attack efforts and stands to have his so called Nevada "victory" shoved where it does not belong. Might Huckabee be a rather nifty McCain VP choice?

But I get ahead of myself. Another thought from the McCain victory: surely Mike Huckabee's failure to win is a massive blow to Rudy Giuliani in his effort to seriously begin his race in Florida? A Huckabee win would have allowed the former New York mayor to present himself as the alternative to the God-bothering tendency in the Republican party. Now McCain is the secular choice, along with Romney I suppose. The chaos benefited Giuliani; if the chaos is just a little less chaotic now, Giuliani is in trouble. Another thought on the McCain campaign - they can do sexy! Look at this...

And a final non-horserace point about the Republicans: they are in quite a mess. The BBC sometimes gets it in the neck for being overly excited by Democrats (I reject that, by the way, but the charge is out there) but the nastiness of the battle ahead for the Republicans is surely far more of a genuine punch-up among real enemies, policy enemies, than is the Democratic fight. Nobody can pretend that the Clintons and Obamas will be going out to dinner any time soon but, on policy they are, frankly, pretty close.

And so to the Democrats. Hillary Clinton won because she won women and she won Latinos. She also won because some voters think - or are persuaded to think - that Senator Obama is a Muslim. This is a fact: I met otherwise well-informed voters in New Hampshire who believed that he refused to be sworn in as a senator with his hand on the Bible. It is out there; it really is. It does not explain the Clinton victories but it adds to them.

Obama must win in South Carolina, of course, to keep the show on the road - and he can win given the large number of African Americans who will vote next week - but he also needs to re-tool his campaign urgently to reach out to the Democats he is missing; in particular he needs to find those women who went for him in Iowa. He has the better brand but many shoppers seem to think they cannot afford it. Think Bang & Olufsen!

UPDATE:

Here is another quick thought on the Obama/Osama issue. A friend writes to me from Las Vegas: "After it was all over here last night met a bartender who considered himslef a liberal, working class guy, life long Democrat, hated Bush, pretty worldly, who told me he didn't vote for Obama because the guy was 'brought up a Muslim and once a Muslim always a Muslim'."

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