The next President could make or break online poker. Denis Campbell reports.

Presidential races create memorable quotes: “Read my lips!” – “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” – “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy”. And this year is no different. “Lipstick on a pig” – “The fundamentals of our economy are strong” – “I said thanks, but no thanks, to that bridge to nowhere” – “John McCain invented the Blackberry” and my personal favourite “McCain put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign and says he’s the one who’s going to take on the old boy network. In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting”. 

Yes, there will be zingers and open-mike gaffes on this road to the White House, but now it’s all about capturing electoral college votes. Win a state – get their votes. California is the biggest prize with 55. Texas with 34, New York 31 and Florida with 27 are also nice. Eight states, including Alaska, are joint smallest with only three college votes apiece. You may think opinion polls showing the race at 49% to 44% are what it’s all about, but in this game it’s the first to 270 who wins.

When I wrote last month’s column, in all but fact we already knew who the presidential contenders were, and their respective conventions have surprised no-one by making it official. The choice of chief is between John McCain and Barack Obama; a bet-the-farm craps shooter (no, really, this guy has a serious taste for mindless gambling) and an ice-in-his-veins poker kid. It’s like Hellmuth and Ivey heads-up for the main event bracelet; Man United versus Chelsea for the Champions League trophy; New York flash against Boston grit.

No matter how you slice it, it’s Game On for the presidential jackpot on 4 November. And from ironic through to moronic, the two campaigns shift positions and change gears faster than fish go bust in Vegas.

In my running mate predictions last month, I finished solidly in the money with Obama’s choice of seasoned foreign policy pro, Joe Biden. But on the GOP side, I obviously hadn’t hit the bottle anything like hard enough when I suggested the sober choices of Mitt Romney and Tom Pawlenty. What was I thinking of when I said that Joe Lieberman from the Democrats (which is the man McCain wanted) was the boldest move we might expect from the Republicans?

When party elders vetoed that choice, McCain seemed to rather impetuously say ‘f*** you, then’ and energised the far right base with his “soul mate,” a gun-toting, pro-life fundamentalist Christian. Yup, it was the Miss Alaska 1984 runner-up, former mayor of Wasilla (population 6,000) and 20-month Governor of a state with the population of East London. A woman who can shoot a moose – Sarah Palin.

Hockey Mom has shrewdly (no, make that ‘shrew-ly’) placed herself above the candidate on the stump – and I’m grateful. She has handicapped the election, and she’s a better storyline. No writer could make this character up – and get away with it. 

I don’t know why I allowed myself to be surprised that McCain should choose Palin to run for vice-president. This is a man who cannot remember how many houses he owns, whose trophy wife owns the largest beer distributorship in America, who corporate jets his way around the USA and thinks the definition of middle class is people making less than $5 million a year. And most to the point, a man who has a history of slipping into private casino rooms for high-roller craps games, routinely dropping $25,000 or more in a session.

Why on earth didn’t I see a complete gamble of a running mate coming – from a man who would place the election, the party, the umpteen houses and his wife’s beer distributorship on the Don’t Pass?

Before the Republican convention, McCain’s campaign was obsessed with showing how unqualified his challenger was. That is until McCain chose someone with even less experience than Senator Obama to sit a heartbeat away from the presidency of a 72-year-old four-time cancer survivor.

As Rounders star Matt Damon said: “It’s like a really bad Disney movie. The hockey mom from Alaska, and she’s the president… facing down Vladimir Putin using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink… it’s absurd.” 

The Palin unveiling was like a classic Phil Hellmuth tournament appearance – showing up late with an applauding entourage in tow, only to donk out early. The difference is that Hellmuth has poker playing skills that have (when he uses them), brought him 11 bracelets. The Palin bubble, which anyone with a pulse could see would burst, was rabidly attacked by the left on all fronts.

She dutifully repeats the same five lines in every stump speech, all of which have been proven to be lies, while avoiding the press at all costs. She is embargoed from speaking to anyone in the media by her handlers, because they are so afraid she will say something critically bad.

And the irony doesn’t stop there. McCain was a member of the notorious ‘Keating Five’, a group of US senators who were investigated and criticised by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting money and other favours from failed Lincoln Savings & Loan magnate Charles Keating, and exercising influence to keep financial watchdogs off his back – with disastrous consequences for thousands of savers. Keating was less fortunate than the tarnished politicians, and went to jail for fraud.

The S&L crisis, in which 700 savings and loan institutions went belly-up, came as a result of the Reagan era’s dogmatic pursuit of deregulation – something John McCain supported. In a large number of cases, failure was largely attributable to imprudent loans against real estate, or what you and I might call risky mortgages. Sound familiar?

Within days of McCain’s recent convention triumph, mortgage institutions Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae needed to be rescued by the US government. Then financial services firm Lehman Brothers cratered and Merrill Lynch was acquired by Bank of America for pennies on the dollar.

Insurance giant AIG was bailed out, the stock market lost and gained back 1,000 points and the government created a new $700 billion toxic loan repository. That means US citizens became the proud owner of banks and insurance giants – and about $28,000 worth of debt per head.

And where did this new crisis come from? Deregulation allowed banks to re-package dodgy mortgage loans and re-sell them as securities, creating the global sub-prime mess. The institutions buying the securities had no idea what they were getting, and nor did they care – as long as they made money on the transaction. 

A new, reform-minded Senator McCain quickly reinvented his past and came out guns blazing. “Greed and excess and corruption have beset Wall Street, and they treated it like a casino and walked away with these fat cat packages,” he said on NBC’s Today Show on 16 September. This was the morning after the market fell 504 points. He was still against regulation and bailouts, though… until the government saved AIG from collapse later that afternoon.

This would all be hypocritical enough, but his chief economic policy advisor is lobbyist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm. Gramm wrote the legislation destroying the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era separation of banks and investment houses that prevented the foxes from owning the hen house. So John McCain borrows the ‘change’ mantle from Barack Obama and is now running on a platform of cleaning up Washington – as if he has not spent the last 26-years of his life there helping to create the problem.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have run a sound, sober and boring campaign since their convention. A day after Obama’s speech before 85,000 people in Denver and a television audience of 38 million people, Sarah Palin pushed him off the front pages, and he doesn’t seem to have minded one bit.

While the media have been screaming ‘the sky is falling,’ and offering all kinds of advice of what he must do to counter the McCain-Palin attacks, Obama remains calm and stays on message. While the press carried out the due diligence on Sarah Palin that Senator McCain obviously did not do, Obama just said that she would be a tough candidate. He remained deferential and respectful while surrogates gouged her eyes out.

Perhaps remembering the lessons of Watergate (where it was the covering up of a relatively small issue that created a national scandal), Obama has quietly watched McCain-Palin dig deep holes around the ‘Troopergate’ scandal, where Governor Palin allegedly used her influence to get rid of Alaska’s head of public safety for refusing to fire her former brother-in-law.

There are now even more Republican lawyers in Alaska trying to stop the investigation into this matter than there were pushing the Florida 2000 vote count to the US Supreme Court. All this has brought folks to question why such a huge show of force is needed to stop such a small investigation. What does she have to hide?

As time passes and the McCain camp has been caught in a pattern of lies, the opinion polls have erased the ‘Palin bounce’. And the poll numbers don’t even cover the sector where Barack Obama has really hit a nerve in the USA – among the young. Polls are of ‘likely’ voters, which means those who have voted in each of the last two Presidential elections. So anyone under the age of 26 is not, by definition, included in these figures. But it’s the University crowd that is mobilised and gaga over Obama.

Nor does the pollsters’ concept of ‘likely’ encompass the half- million new voters recently registered in the state of Indiana, where there were only 4 million total voters in 2004. These are the ‘Obamanians’ that his candidacy has inspired to register for the first time.

Here’s an example of how on the ball Obama’s campaign is. While I was writing a story about Bill Gates I discovered that his charitable/philanthropic foundation uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to target funding based on social, economic and environmental challenges. On a web page explaining the system I found an Obama campaign advert for a GIS specialist, to help them target volunteer mobilisation efforts – beginning in February! 

There has never been an organisation with a game like Barack Obama’s. The battles with Hillary Clinton tested him, and he has field operations in 57 states and territories. McCain doesn’t even have offices in 10 states.

This is where Obama’s skills in getting people out in the field come to the fore. Using peer pressure to motivate supporters via MyBarackObama.com, where volunteers log in and see how well they are doing compared to others. 

Finally, his is a no-drama, no-surprises campaign. McCain has had to throw several surrogates under the bus: Phil Gramm for calling this a “mental recession” and the American people “whiners”; and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina for suggesting “neither McCain nor Palin could run a major corporation.”

Those using the ‘no experience’ line about Obama don’t see how overnight he became what is in effect the CEO of a $500 million national campaign organisation (raising $96, on average, per person) and energised almost 2.5 million people. 

That’s why I’m ready to go all-in and say that Barack Obama will win comfortably on 4 November and become the 44th President of the United States. It won’t be a Nixonian landslide of 49 states, but his electoral vote total will be closer to 325 (270 needed to win, remember) than the numbers currently showing. 

For John McCain, the call will be very familiar: “Seven-out, line in.” Or for those who don’t play craps: you just lost, sucker.