Bush, or Sarah Palin, or the countless others of that ilk, can get elected?
The United States has a two-tier or two-round electoral system. In the first round, political parties (which for some time in American history have chiefly meant the Democrats and Republicans) choose their candidates through a primary process, in which each state votes for whichever candidate they want to represent their party in the main election. So if you are a Democrat and you live in New York, you vote in the New York Democratic party primary — you might have voted for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Republicans might have voted for John McCain or Rudy Giuliani. Once those nominees are chosen (through a complex process that counts the results of those state-by-state primaries), there is a general election in which the nominees of the major parties face each other. In our case this year it was John McCain versus Barack Obama. You write often about Karl Rove and Rovian politics. Who is he, and why has he had so much influence over American politics over the last eight years? Rove
