British readers might be pardoned for wondering whether Americans – or at least Iowa caucus-goers – are a little crazy. On Thursday night, the ninth night of Christmas, some 340,000 Iowans (out of 2 million registered voters) chose for their party’s presidential nominations two men whom no one outside their home states had heard of four years ago and who, between them, have less than four years’ experience in the federal government.

Barack Obama, a state senator from the South Side of Illinois four years ago, won a stunning victory in the Democratic caucuses. (It was even more stunning than the official count suggests, since it underrepresents cities such as Des Moines and university towns such as Iowa City where Mr Obama did very well.) Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas for ten years but, unlike his predecessor Bill Clinton, not a Rhodes Scholar but a graduate of Ouachita Baptist College, won a smashing victory over the heavy-spending former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a graduate of Harvard Business and Law Schools.

This does not seem like the way to choose the leader of the two great parties in the greatest democracy in the world – unless you compare it with the various leadership selection processes (dinner at Granita, anyone? Another whisky, Mr Kennedy?) of the main British parties in recent years. Yet we are stuck with it and we must make the best of it.

What accounts for the victories of Mr Obama and Mr Huckabee? In Mr Obama’s case it is his promise of transcending the divisive politics of the baby-boomer culture wars that started in the Sixties. Never mind that Mr Obama’s impulses on policy sound very much like a soft European-style welfare state socialism, which Americans heretofore have never embraced wholeheartedly. He is a well-spoken, pleasant, African-American (literally; his father was a Kenyan) who argues, when he gets serious about it, that he can win enough votes to bring in a sufficiently Democratic Congress that will enact, something like the Labour Government of 1945-51 achieved, a thoroughgoing rebalancing of public and private sectors. Young voters, who never experienced the stagflation of the 1970s (which had something like the impact of Britain’s winter of discontent), are drawn to this vision and turned out for him in precedent-shattering numbers.

As for Mr Huckabee, the caption in one of his TV ads identified him as “Christian leader”, and he brought to the caucus sites an increased number of born-again Christians. But reflecting the changes among evangelicals, his message was less one of denunciation of immorality and denial of choices and more one of generosity and sympathy. He increased taxes as Governor of Arkansas, he pardoned dozens of felons, he denounced the “arrogant bunker mentality” of George W. Bush’s foreign policy.

All this has flummoxed Washington-based conservatives. But Mr Huckabee, who grew up in the town of Hope, Arkansas, where Bill Clinton was born, is an immensely likeable and fluent speaker, in touch with popular culture (he has featured the action actor Chuck Norris in his ads) and virtually impossible to dislike. If he were a womaniser, he would have had chalked up many more scores than his former townsman.

Where does this leave the two parties? The Democratic race will almost surely boil down to a two-way contest between Mr Obama and Hillary Clinton. They will face each other in New Hampshire next Tuesday and in contests in weeks to come; and the outcome is unclear. John Edwards, the populist who has spent the past ten years trying to leverage a $25 million lawsuit settlement into the presidency of the United States, had a poor finish in Iowa and will almost surely drop by the wayside. Mr Obama’s young, upscale constituency will vie with Clinton’s old, downscale one – and either one could prevail.

On the Republican side there is more disarray. Some 60 per cent of Republican Iowa caucus-goers were born-again Christians, but among the rest Mr Huckabee won only 13 per cent of the vote – a splinter share. He likely won’t do better in more secular New Hampshire or in many big states that will vote on February 5. John McCain, leading in postChristmas New Hampshire polls over Mitt Romney, hopes Mr Romney’s loss in Iowa will wipe him out; and it may. Rudy Giuliani proclaims that he’ll compete in Florida on January 29 and in the other big states a week later.

What is missing from all this discussion, you may have noticed, is a rigorous debate on public policy. For most of the past year Democrats have been denouncing George W. Bush, who will not be on the November ballot, and Republicans have been denouncing Mrs Clinton, who, given the Iowa results, may well not be either. Democratic turnout in the Iowa caucuses seems to have been double the Republican turnout, a ratio reflected also in contributions to presidential candidates – a good sign for Democrats.

Yet the Rasmussen poll, which accurately reported the decline in Republican Party identification between 2004 and 2006, now shows a sharp uptick in Republican Party ID. My view is that the issue content of both parties’ candidates has been exceedingly thin, and that there is room for a rollicking debate on where public policy should go next in America. Whether the two parties’ eventual nominees – we’ll almost surely know the Democrat by February 5 but may not know the Republican till some time later – will provide such serious intellectual content is far from certain.

Michael Barone is the principal author of The Almanac of American Politics

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