US Elections : An attempt to understand.

At least 130 million Americans are expected to cast votes on a successor to Republican President George W Bush. People living outside America find it difficult to get a clear picture of the issues and candidates in the US presidential election 2008 as a majority of the US media and the blogs seem to have become rather emotive (and partisan?), and the verbiage in the news reports and commentary is not of much help to non-Americans.

Perhaps this is understandable owing to the unenviable situation the USA finds itself today…but isn’t the media supposed to uphold the basic tenets of journalism by providing fair, objective and understandable news/commentary, whoever the audience?

I also wonder whether this emotive/sensational/partisan approach to presidential election is leading to an increasingly garbled reporting and commentary, which may, in turn, also create a degree of confusion among the American voters. It is a known fact that in the US elections the voter participation varies between moderate and low (not a good commentary on the state of democracy in one of the world’s leading democracies).

Maybe I don’t have the correct information. But I, and many others worldwide, would be delighted to know which magazine/newspaper/blog/site/journalist offers the most objective/fair election information with a degree of clarity and simplicity. It will be a good exercise to conduct a poll to this effect.

Voting ends in 48 states in hours and the first polls begin to close in parts of Indiana and Kentucky late Tuesday night. Barack Obama, 47, a first-term senator from Illinois, would be the first black US president if he is elected.

Opinion polls indicate he is running ahead of his rival John McCain in enough states to give him more than the 270 electoral votes he needs to win. A victory for Mr McCain, 72, would make him the oldest president to begin a first term in the White House and make his running mate Sarah Palin the first female US vice president.

Mr McCain, an Arizona senator, embraced his role as an underdog and said he is gaining ground on Mr Obama. He was hitting seven states on the last day of campaigning as he tried to pull off the biggest upset in recent political history.

Opinion polls show Mr Obama ahead or even with Mr McCain in at least eight states won by Mr Bush in 2004, including the big prizes of Ohio and Florida. Mr Obama leads comfortably in all of the states won by Democrat John Kerry in 2004.

Breakthrough victories in any of those traditionally Republican states - including Virginia, Colorado, Indiana and North Carolina - would almost certainly propel Mr Obama to the White House.

It was a bittersweet last campaign day for Mr Obama. He choked up in North Carolina when talking about the death of his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who helped raise him. Mr Obama, who learned earlier in the day of his grandmother's death from cancer in Hawaii, called her a "quiet hero."

Some 27 million of them have already voted - either by absentee ballot, or in the 30 states that allow people to vote early. There have been reports too numerous to mention of ten-hour long queues, of insufficient poll workers or voting machines. But state officials are adamant they will be prepared for the influx. It's all too important for this to go wrong.

Victory, be it a landslide or a knife edge - it's a last, thrilling finish to a long, long campaign. Let's wait for the results, and see what effect it's going to have on the world.