Hillary Clinton wins Nevada | John McCain triumphs in South Carolina

The way Hillary Clinton has been spinning her victory in Nevada, it was as if she was the underdog against Barack Obama’s formidable political machine. Her advisers are claiming, “We won a huge victory by overcoming institutional hurdles and one of the worst negative ads in recent memory.” Bill Clinton went so far as to call his wife the “insurgent” candidate.

There is a lot of preposterous rewriting of history going on. It was certainly an important victory for Mrs Clinton, but she was always the favourite to win in Nevada after locking up the support of key Democrats in the state, including the son of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and the brother of Cesar Chavez, the Hispanic labour hero, even though Mr Obama won the support of the Culinary Workers’ Union.

After all the hoopla, Clinton is simply back to where she was in the first place as the favourite to win the Democratic nomination – we’re just a lot clearer after a particularly nasty race about how badly she and Bill want to return to the White House. We can now expect them to put the squeeze on African-American voters ahead of South Carolina’s Democratic primary this Saturday and start collecting on all the IOU’s they hold.

At one point Mrs Clinton was predicted to win Nevada by 25 per cent and was still 6 points ahead when the caucuses opened. For once the polls got the result roughly right – although they managed to miss the implosion of John Edwards, who worked extraordinarily hard to secure a miniscule 4 per cent of the vote.

Mr Edwards’s continued presence in the race may help Mr Obama to regain some momentum in South Carolina because he could split the white vote with Mrs Clinton. But predictions that his departure from the race could ultimately help Mr Obama were disproved in Nevada. Mr Edwards’s support cratered and Clinton still won.

He may harbour hopes of being a “kingmaker” at the Democratic National Convention, if the candidates emerge from Super Tuesday on February 5 without a clear winner, but it is more likely that he will serve as a cautionary tale about how quickly political losers can be marginalised.

When Mr Obama quotes Martin Luther King about the “fierce urgency of now” on the stump and his wife Michelle speaks about not hanging around to go through the same thing all over again in eight years’ time, they know that there are few second chances in politics.

On the other hand, they can always look across the aisle to John McCain, the victor in South Carolina last night, who is a quarter of a century older than Mr Obama and on his second presidential run.

Having survived the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War, he gamely struggled through the near-fatal collapse of his campaign last summer to reappear as he was at the start of the race – as the favourite to win his party’s nomination, like Mrs Clinton.

Mr McCain has strong enemies among die-hard Republicans, who consider the war hero to be popular with Democrats, independents and the liberal media rather than one of them. But some sane conservative voices are urging the Republicans to stop picking quarrels among themselves and start backing Mr McCain if they want to have any chance of winning the White House.

The Arizona Senator’s victory over the evangelical Mike Huckabee was narrow – he won by 33 per cent to 30 per cent – but it should now inject some stability into a race which has seen candidates rise and fall to great heights and depths.

The fact that Mr McCain pulled himself back from the brink of disaster into the position of frontrunner without any help from Republican bigwigs means that he is free to be his own man for the rest of the campaign.

It is an enviable position for a person of integrity to be in and it will help Mr McCain to run a strong campaign against Mrs Clinton, if they go on to win their parties’ nomination. Both candidates have shown themselves to be indomitable fighters, in their own way.

The polls show that Mr McCain is well-placed to beat Mrs Clinton but, as we have learnt in this race, they cannot be relied on.

The Republicans might like to look back on the campaign that Bill Clinton ran in 1996 against Bob Dole, a friend of Mr McCain and elderly second-world-war hero, which did not turn out too well for them. There may be some lessons they can learn.

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