‘The Walls of Babylon’

Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the fourth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.

After 14 weeks, the Democratic primaries seem “like a good movie that’s gone on for about half-an-hour too long,” as Barack Obama allowed recently. Even the slow crawl of weeks between the last and next contest has begun feeling like a Golgotha trek. So perhaps it’s natural that, with Pennsylvania now just nine days off, many commentators have fallen to squaring the usual hype about it being the “decisive” state.

If, they say, Obama wins Pennsylvania—confounding all but one recent poll—that’ll be that: not even the Clintons will have the brass to continue their doomed campaign. And even if they did, enough of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates would announce for Obama at that point to take him across the finish line, 2024 delegates.