DATELINE: Philadelphia, PA

Ha, made you look. Because of course, we don’t know. No-one knows.

But unlike our good friends the professionals, we don’t make a big show of anointing winners based on a few polls. Ahem. Cough. Like EVERYONE else did. ‘What’s at the core of The Obama Phenomenon?’ begged CNN on the morning of the New Hampshire primary, vaunting his 10% poll lead. ‘Why did we get it so wrong?’ they asked each other later that night. ‘Well, we’re TV news pundits, we’re not supposed to be that smart’, one ‘expert’ joked. The experts just pulled off the same trick for last night’s Republican primary in Michigan: predicting a win for McCain over Romney, when in fact the latter won very comfortably.

This is why we’re not doing much predicting. Reporting on people and issues, capturing atmospheres and talking to voters is considerably more satisfying than pouring gas into or onto phoney bandwagons all day long. Also, it means you don’t have to follow up unexpected results by desperately walking back your erroneous predictions until you trip over your own feet.

There are a lot of bandwagons about in US election coverage. For my esteemed New Statesman colleague Andrew Stephen, the Obama bandwagon is on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel. Stephen spent 2,000 words cynically outlining every single thing that Barack Obama has ever done wrong, and omitting everything he has ever done right, as some kind of weird backwards-facing explanation of why the Senator for Illinois didn’t in fact overhaul Hillary in New Hampshire, as the polls had predicted. (”What’s going wrong for the man who would be President?” begged the Statesman’s front cover. Erm, nothing actually. He failed to secure New Hampshire’s miniscule number of delegates by a small margin. Big whoop.)

Stephen’s hatchet-job gives us such relevant insights as this:

“Far from being the brilliant student his image suggests, Obama was a consistently B-grade pupil.”

Phew. Thank god the voters know the truth now. Only ‘B’s: shocking. And never mind Obama’s Harvard degree, of course, which goes unmentioned.

Dennis Kucinich’s English wife Elizabeth was quick to lament the “celebrification” (her neologism) of American politics when I buttonholed her at her husband’s ‘un-victory’ party in Manchester, New Hampshire last week. “This whole thing is crazy,” she said, gesturing at the cameras, mics, lights, and lenses ringed around the edges of Jillian’s bar, “it’s more like following around a rock star than a politician.” She’s right, but I would tweak her critique – the US media are not so much guilty of reducing politics to celebrity culture; they’re guilty of reducing it to sport.

It’s not just the constant, ongoing ‘post-game analysis’, with talking heads, graphs, and super-magnified controversies that are reverently granted capital letters (’Waterworksgate’, the New York Daily News dubbed Hillary’s damp retinas after Iowa). It’s the fanatical obsession with comparative statistics that renders politics as sport.

After the Democratic debate in New Hampshire, ABC News looked at the key words that had been used. Two in particular were tallied against one another: ‘Change’ got 25. ‘Qualifications’ got 15. John Edwards and Barack Obama were both campaigning for ‘change’; Hillary on the other hand wanted her experience and her political CV to be the decisive factor. The final result was 25-15 in favour of ‘change’. Ergo, you can infer, Hillary lost the debate.

Obama’s campaign accentuates this reductive, post-modern approach to the campaign by placing the word ‘Hope’ in big white letters on his posters, where you would ordinarily expect them to say ‘Obama’. This is a pretty out-there idea, when you think about it. You are being encouraged to vote for an abstract concept rather than an individual. What happens in 2012, should Barack Obama win (his B-grades at school notwithstanding)? ‘Re-elect Hope! Four more years of Hope!’

The morning after New Hampshire, FOX News announced that they had discovered the ‘x’ factor that had won it for Hillary – single women, according to their exit polls (more numbers, oh blessed numbers!). This information gave them all they needed to complete what they somehow neglected to call The Mummy Continuum:

“This massive turn-out of single women raises an interesting possibility,” the breakfast news team told us brightly, “the Soccer Mums clinched it for Bill Clinton, the Security Mums got George W. Bush elected – could it be that the Single Mums win it for Hillary Clinton?”. Pausing briefly to observe that, erm, actually, a single woman is not the same thing as a single mum, this was pretty much the last straw for us. We turned off the TV.

Reducing politics to a number or a pie-chart is no better than reducing it to a haircut or a salty tear – crocodilian or otherwise. Either way, it’s no wonder American voters get fed up with mainstream election coverage before the race has even got out of the starting blocks. Our advice would be follow our lead, turn off the TV, and get out there.