With South Carolina the main act before Tsunami Tuesday, your correspondent took the political temperature of one or two local taprooms, and found that, if barflies control the swing vote, Hillary would knock Obama out of the state.

The reason? Pure strategic voting. As Clive, a half-black half-Indian (subcontinent, not native american) patron of Lester’s, a combined grocery/hot dog/beer emporium, put it; “oh we’re not falling for the Obama thing… they’ll let a black man get almost all the way, then they’ll shut it down”, a statement to which there was pretty general assent from the assembled punters, all but one black, the sole good ol’ boy perhaps wisely unwilling to comment. Fairly or otherwise, the way he wore his baseball cap said GOP to me.

Maybe it was something in the beer, because the rest of the state sure isn’t running that way. A recent poll has SC Democrats running 66-19 in favour of Obama over Hillary, which would indicate a swing of 20-30 points and can only really, after New Hampshire, cast more doubt on quikbux polling methods being used to get fast news results.

Despite its predominantly black population, SC was never going to be a slam dunk – and dear readers the slang infection is only going to get worse – for Obama. Quite aside from strategic voting concerns, the Clintons have a measure of support among black voters that goes way beyond the simple black lean toward the Democratic party. They retained this even though Clinton B signed into law the bill “ending welfare as we know it” in the 90s, plunging millions of black people into a lower levels of poverty. As Mike said, only half-ironically, further down the road, “we’ve already had one black president”.

The discussion is not strong on policy, but then very little in the mainstream media is either. Only three of the candidates’ – Obama, Huckabee and Paul — short-burst ads deal with policies, the latter two on immigration (“build the wall” – ie the US-Mexican one), Obama’s recent spot focusing on price-gouging by big pharmaceutical companies. Clinton’s focuses on experience, Edwards is about the fact that his dad was a mill worker, Fred Thompson’s tells you that the media likes his tax plan without telling you what it is.

The news feed in between has focused largely on the escalating Clinton/Obama camp “race” row. Clinton’s blundering comment about LBJ and civil rights was kicked back into play by Bob Johnston, billionaire founder of cable-TV network Black Entertainment Network, who intimated that the Clintons were working for civil rights at about the time that Obama – according to his own memoir – was doing drugs in Chicago.

After that both camps called a truce, though both have found it hard to keep their troops in order. Part of the problem has been a vacuum on the Democratic side – with the Republicans focused on the just-closed Michigan primary, Democrat wheels are still spinning, waiting for the Nevada vote.

Meanwhile the life-or-death battle for Michigan produced enough heat to cast some light on policy, especially as regards the smoking ruin of the American car industry. As I write, votes are only just starting to be counted, with exit polls suggesting McCain and Romney neck-and-neck, with the latter hometwon boy (whose father was governor) having everything to lose lakeside.

What came out was a discussion of industry policy – to try and revive the industry or retrain the workforce – though it continued to be wrapped up in issues of personality, with Romney (“the Edsel can be rebuilt!”) chiding McCain for “pessimism” for making the eminently sensible observation that maybe the world doesn’t want cars which cost more wholesale than a whole fleet of Indian cars will cost as an impulse buy.

McCain’s argument is more honest than those of Romney – who suggests that the $US1700 “heritage costs” (the amount per car manufacturers have paid in worker layoffs) is all that is holding American back from renewed world domination. But even McCain is not telling the whole truth – that there is no will in America, nor political elbow room, to make the sort of massive state-private reinvestment that would get the rustbelt working again. It’s very easy to underestimate the degree to which the place is not merely recessed but wrecked, unless you’ve seen a city like Detroit – population of 700,000 down from 2,000,000, whole suburbs and skyscrapers being reclaimed by nature.

It will take years more poverty before wage expectations are driven down enough for manufacturing revival to become possible again, and it would take a generation for a retrained value-added manufacturing/knowledge industry to start up, and by then things would have moved on. And no candidate has the honesty to try a slogan of “Detroit: I will slightly ease your inevitable decline”.

Of the GOPers, only Huckabee is offering a moderate measure of protectionism that would actually save jobs – whatever its long term consequences – and yet his campaign ads are focusing on his desire to rewrite the constitution, so as to put God at its centre which, unless I’ve lost my mind, is the effective abolition of one founding principle of the Republic.

When a civilisation dies, strange shadows appear, the man said, and that seems to differentiate the forlorn hopes of Michigan from Nevada, where enormous economic expansion has given unions – such as the Culinary Workers – real power. The latter have given Obama the nod, while the Teachers’ union has got behind Clinton.

If the idea of Vegas as a union town seems strange, it shouldn’t – entertainment is now the core of the economy (hence the power of the writers’ strike), so it’s the last place where withdrawal of labour actually really really hurts profits. But Edwards is also running strongly in Nevada and currently running at 27%, a result which is surprising everyone in a race in which everything is surprising everyone.

If the bars on River Ave are as good a guide as any, that season in the sun may be brief. “John who?”. If. If. If.