Alan Fisher

Going it alone in Scotland

Alex Salmond is as smart a political operator as they come.

His choice of January 25th - when Scots around the world celebrate the birthday of national bard, Robert Burns - to take the first steps towards an independence referendum was not coincidental.

Nor is the proposed date of the vote, autumn 2014, the 700th anniversary of a famous Scottish victory over English forces at Bannockburn. It's a battle commemorated in a song sung before most Scottish sporting events, recalling how the Scots sent King Edward and his army 'home tae think again". 

Since Salmond's Scottish National Party was founded 80 years ago, its goal has been the break up of the UK with the establishment of a sovereign independent state.

Mitt Romney's bad week

It’s been a bad week for Mitt Romney. Seven days ago, he was looking at virtually tying up the Republican Party nomination with victory in South Carolina and moving on to Florida for the coronation.

But then things started to go wrong.

He discovered he didn’t actually win the first contest in Iowa. A recount of the votes handed victory to his rival Rick Santorum. His performances in the latest two candidate debates in this process, where he has been steady if unaccomplished, looked shaky and uncertain. Asked if he would release details of his tax returns, he joked and dodged and avoided, leaving many people to question what he was trying to hide. He said if he received the nomination, he would release them then. That didn’t go down well – so he suggested he’d release them when they were completed, which would be in April. The demands still persist that he release them now.

The aura of inevitability

Some presidential election campaigns will end here in South Carolina.

The candidate or candidates will come to the realisation that they cannot win the Republican nomination, that their vision of America has not been accepted by the majority, and that despite the hopes and dreams, the hands shaken and the interviews given, that it is finally over.

Jon Huntsman has already left the field, lacking money and supporters, his “ticket out of New Hampshire" not even good for a week.

To accept the thinking of the Mitt Romney campaign, then the contest is over.

He has done what no other Republican challenger has, and that's win the first two nomination contests, in Iowa and New Hampshire. And they argue, victory in South Carolina on Saturday - which has picked the winner in every contest since 1980 - will make him the presumptive nominee for his party. They are attempting to build an aura of inevitability.

The conservatives in his party don't like him.

The morning after

It was just before two in the morning when the head of Iowa's Republican Party walked onto the stage in front of the thinning ranks of journalists in the Polk Convention Centre in Des Moines to announce the result of the state's caucus.
 
After a record turnout of more than 122, 000, the former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, topped the poll by just eight votes.

But even though he finished first, the big winner on the night was the new standard bearer for the right of Republican Party, former Pennsylvania senator, Rick Santorum.
 
And that perhaps is an indication of the battle America's Grand Old Party has been having with itself over the past two years.

It believes Barack Obama is vulnerable and they could easily consign him to the history books as a one-term president, but they don't know what face to present to the wider American public.