DEMOCRAT PRIMARIES: After Senator John Kerry's twin Southern victories on Tuesday, the Democratic candidates still with an outside chance of catching him are making Wisconsin, scene of the next Democratic primary, their showdown state.
Senator John Edwards, who came second in Tennessee and Virginia on Tuesday, and Howard Dean, who has still to win a primary, are looking to the mid-western state to live up to its maverick reputation and refuse to crown the front-runner.
Their chances were marginally increased yesterday by the decision of retired Gen Wesley Clark to quit the race after losing badly on his home ground to Senator Kerry.
The Massachusetts man won Tennessee with 41 per cent of the vote, to 26 per cent for Mr Edwards and 23 per cent for Gen Clark, and coasted home in Virginia with 52 per cent to 27 per cent for Mr Edwards and 9 per cent for Gen Clark.
In both cases, Mr Dean, who did not campaign, the Rev Al Sharpton and Congressman Dennis Kucinich finished in single digits.
Mr Clark returned to his home base of Little Rock, Arkansas, yesterday to announce his decision to leave the race. A political neophyte, the retired four-star general only declared his candidacy in September and briefly topped the polls as a post 9/11 candidate who could compete with President Bush on national security.
But the former supreme allied commander of NATO never appeared at ease with voters, and his decision to stake all on Tennessee failed spectacularly.
Mr Clark's departure is good news for Mr Edwards, also a Southerner, but the North Carolina senator would have preferred it to come earlier to give him a chance of defeating Mr Kerry in Tennessee, where the Southern vote was split.
Mr Clark said he would support Mr Kerry against Mr Bush as "the lesser of two evils".
In scoring two important victories in Dixie, Senator Kerry tapped into Democratic anger against the president, according to exit polls, and got strong support among voters who wanted a candidate with the ability to defeat Mr Bush.
This is likely also to be the case in Wisconsin, where Mr Kerry is well ahead in the polls without setting foot here since June. Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle told the Milwaukee Sentinel yesterday that he thought the state "would fit right in with what's been happening" in other primaries.
Democrats across the country increasingly see Mr Kerry as the candidate to beat Mr Bush, and rival campaigns, particularly Mr Dean's, are now seen by the party establishment as futile and obstinate attempts to bring him down.
Echoing this, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold said the state's role should be to "coronate" the senator from Boston.
Though Wisconsin has a maverick reputation - "We're kind of quirky" said Democratic chairwoman Linda Honold - the state played a king-making role once before, in 1960, when it gave a surprise primary victory to John F. Kennedy over local favourite Hubert Humphrey.
Mr Dean said he would not run a "quixotic campaign to ruin the Democrats' chances of beating Bush," but his TV commercials in Wisconsin appeal to voters not to rubber-stamp Mr Kerry.
At the Irish American Cultural Centre in Milwaukee on Tuesday evening, the former Vermont governor, who once led the polls here, asked voters to stand up against "Washington insiders".
Mr Edwards told a rally in Milwaukee's Serb Hall, "We are going to have a campaign and an election, not a coronation."
While Mr Kerry and Mr Edwards are declining to criticise each other - in anticipation of sharing the Democratic ticket - Mr Dean yesterday accused the front-runner of being "part of the corrupt political culture in Washington".
He was referring to reports that former New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli, a fund-raiser for Mr Kerry, helped pay for TV ads using images of Osama bin Laden to question Mr Dean's ability to fight terrorism.