DATELINE: Oakland, California

When we planned this trip, it always had definite bookends: the Iowa Caucus, at the start, and then Super Tuesday as the grand finale, the closest America has ever got to having a nationwide primary. With so many states voting on one day, it seemed like when the dust settled on 6 February we would have an end to our narrative, a final scene for our film: Tom and I stumbling tired, battered and bruised into the sunset, possibly accompanied by Governor Bill Richardson. Well, it now seems that someone’s shown that film to a test audience, and they’ve decided they want to spin out the plot for several more hours before resolving anything. Hillary, Barack: what are you guys trying to do to us?

As you may or may not know from the more traditional news outlets, John McCain was the big winner in the Republican race, with Mike Huckabee doing better than expected, and Mitt Romney doing worse than expected. The Republicans look closer than ever to picking McCain as their candidate, but doing so will alienate substantial swathes of their conservative base, especially in those southern states that Huckabee cleaned up in tonight. The night for the Democrats was pretty much split down the middle: Obama got more states, Hillary got more big states – including California – and neither of them will be conceding anything for a good while yet.

We’re just back from spending the marathon results session in La Val’s Pizza Restaurant, having been invited by the cheerful, resilient Berkeley for Obama supporters. We took our place at 4pm to watch the results start coming in from the eastern states, but at that time there wasn’t much politicking going on in the room. We met Sid, who is Canadian, and failing his economics degree at Berkeley because of his dedication to the Obama campaign. He went to Mason City, Iowa earlier this year, hitching a ride with another volunteer from Chicago out to the tiny midwestern town ahead of the caucus. “I’m pretty invested in this campaign,” he told us, with some understatement.

It wasn’t until 8pm local time, when the Californian polls closed, that the Obama supporters started to show up, with their signs, badges, and t-shirts, fumbling their way around plastic tables and into diner-style booths, their eyes permanently fixed on the big news-bearing screen in the middle of the room, like the Mona Lisa inverted.

In such an achingly long results session, lubricated by over seven hours of beer, soda, and tantalising, glistening pizza grease, there were inevitably considerable peaks and troughs. In the lulls, every new bit of news becomes magnified in importance, the absurdly over-used ‘Breaking News!’ tag for once convincing in its phoney weight. “Romney wins Montana!” Rachael called out at one point, seeming to realise about half-way through delivering these three words that none of them were of interest to her. We laugh at the relative insignificance of this news, electorally speaking. “Montana? What is that? Like maybe three delegates? A farmer, his wife, and their pet pig?” A debate ensues as to whether this line is better finished with the word ‘pig’, ‘cactus’, or ‘rock’, and whether Montana in fact has cacti – or anything else. It was a long night.

But there was genuine excitement too. When Obama overturned Hillary’s long-held lead in the slowly-tallying Missouri popular vote, it was met with a room-full of whoops, cheers, and a snatch of the classic ‘fired up! ready to go!’. Twenty seconds later, CNN projected Arizona for Hillary Clinton, to pantomime boos and hisses. When Alaska went for Obama, meanwhile, the 40-odd students erupted in tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm – massive, full-strength, double-armed high-fives are exchanged. ‘Woo! Alaska!” someone shouts. Meanwhile Senator Obama’s speech from Illinois, another fine one in a litany of fine speeches, earned him some dogged, sincere responses from the committed young activists in the room. “Change is coming to America” declaimed Obama from the TV screen. “Damn right it is!” shouted a fresh-faced young turk from beneath his nascent beard. “I didn’t travel the country for nothing!”

When CNN projected California for Clinton at about 9.20 local time, it was not met with surprise, let alone shock or horror; just quiet, mature murmurs of disappointment. There was no need for rage against the dying of the light (”Washington does not need more heat. It needs more light.” is one of my favourite Obama epigrams) – because the contest is not even half-lost yet. Victor, our friend from Wisconsin who we met earlier in the day, is concerned about what the prolonged struggle to find a nominee will do for the Democrats chances in November, but he’s also relishing the challenges ahead:

“When the delegate counts from tonight are all in they’ll be pretty even I think, Obama and Clinton, so it’s all about how the media report it in the next few days, whether they decide someone is ‘the big winner’. But I think it could be the first time in decades that the race goes all the way to a brokered convention [in Denver in late August] – which would be both awesome and absolutely terrifying at the same time.”

Six more months of this, followed by a kind of giant, three-day super-caucus to make the final decision? What kind of masochists do they take us for?