What a pretty date: 8/8/08.

A nice date for the Olympic Games to start in China where 8 is a lucky number. In North Carolina 0.08 is the legal threshold of drunkenness and today there is a campaign against drunken driving.

The opening night of the Olympics didn't get much attention tonight, due to the shocking news about John Edwards. It's horrible what he did to his family, and it's absolutely incredible that he decided to run for President when he knew this sword of Damocles was hanging over his head.

Today Hillary Clinton gave the closing speech of her primary campaign.

An impressive speech, that makes you realize what an historic race this has been and will be in the next 5 months.

Barack Obama will be in Raleigh, North Carolina on Monday on the State Fair grounds.

Tonight Barack Obama officially secured the nomination for the Democratic Party, in a remarkable evening.

Five long months of primaries are now over, and it's on to the official elections.

Today were the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana. Mr. Obama won, as expected, in North Carolina, but with a surprisingly large margin.

With Indiana being so closely tied (52% to 48% for Clinton at the time I write this), this looks like a very important night for Mr. Obama. The mathematics have been very difficult for Clinton for about two months now. Tonight's lack of a convincing victory, even after all the Wright publicity, bode bad for Clinton.

There were lots of other elections today. Ms. Perdue and Mr. McCrory won their parties nominations for governor. Mr. Walter Dalton seemed to have benefited from his annoying commercials and won the nomination for Lt. Governor.

Something that seemed quite unlikely only a few months ago is now true: the primaries in North Carolina will be quite important.

The race for the Democratic nominee is still not concluded, and after Pennsylvania the largest remaining state will be the Tarheel State. Mr. Obama has agreed to a debate in North Carolina, Mrs. Clinton has not committed to one yet.

For all North Carolian readers: today is the first day you can apply for an absentee ballot, and you have until April 11 to register, change your party affiliation or your address. More details on WakeGOV.com.

Most of you will by now have seen the popular Yes We Can video by will.i.am about Barack Obama. The format of the clip is powerful but fairly straightforward, and it lends itself well to parodies. Here's on about John McCain for example: John He Is.

Of course, anybody can make these videos but there is now an official response by the Hillary Clinton campaign: Hillary for you and me.

From a public relations point of view this video is a remarkable failure. The comments on the video are all negative and the comments on YouTube have now been disabled after a flood of negative feedback. Even The Economist wrote: "Unfortunately, no one with any musical talent appears to have been involved in the effort. I must warn you, the following video is very creepy and probably shouldn't be watched if there are kids in the room.". Strange that a generally well-run campaign would release such a bad video.

Ah, another great night for political junkies -- the Super Tuesday results.

I had a meeting until 8.30 pm today but I received the first projections on my cell phone. During the evening we watched the results coming in. I had to look up the locations of some of the states (Idaho, Missouri) and it was interesting to see the differences between various parts of the countries.

Lots of states were still being counted as of midnight, but it looks like Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama are going head to head, with a slight edge for Clinton. Pretty amazing, compared to the polls only two months ago when Clinton was ahead it every state on the ballot this week. The contest on the Democratic side will go on for many more weeks, something that I believe is in Obama's favor.

The results on the Republic side were quite interesting. My prediction that Mr. Romney would win the nomination looks pretty shaky right now as became clear in the last week. Mr. Huckabee is doing surprisingly well -- better than Romney even. The only thing that caused the crowd to loudly cheer in Mitt Romney's headquarters was when he said: "...and we're going to end illegal immigration". Neither McCains nor Clinton's speeches were very inspiring but all candidates must be extremely tired by now. At the same time: Mr. Obama's speech was again very well delivered -- what a gifted speaker.

Tonight's Democratic candidates debate was very heated. Possibly too heated for Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama's good, but I thought it was very enjoyable and a good exchange of ideas. I don't think the debate changed the minds of a lot of voters, but Mr. Obama did take his chance to address some of the attacks by the Clinton campaign from last week.

It was interesting that the candidates thought that Mr. McCain is likely to be the Republican nominee. I still believe Mr. Romney will be their choice.

Today is Martin Luther King Day and I watched 15 minutes of his famous speech. As a blog put it: "it never gets old".

The program for this week: Thursday the Republican Debate on MSNBC, Saturday the Democratic primaries in South Carolina, and Sunday again a Democratic Debate, this time in Florida.

Like I said earlier, watching the primaries unfold is great. Tonight from 8.00 pm we were at the TV and watching the first results coming in from 8.30 pm. Too bad CNN had Lou "War on the Middle Class" Dobbs presenting the first part; I was glad that Larry King took over at 9.00 pm.

Let me try a little predicting for the Republican race: I think Huckabee will win in South Carolina. His organization is strong there, the polls look good and coming from Arkansas he should do well in the South. For Florida, the next primary after South Carolina on Saturday, I find it hard to make a reasonable guess. Guilliani keeps saying that Florida is 'his state' because of the people who moved there from New York but that seems to me a weak idea for an election strategy. Guilliani has done embarrassingly bad in the first few primaries even in states where he could have been expected to do well. Mitt Romney is somewhat stiff in his manners, and his opponents call him a 'flip flopper' but of all the candidates he has the best chance of winning, if not in Florida then at least on February 5th, Super Tuesday.

Over-all, of all the candidates, I think Romney is probably best placed to win the nomination. I like McCain myself, but I don't think he has a serious chance of winning: the Republican base just doesn't care for him, and his campaign has hardly any money left. The same goes for Thompson, he is doing pretty bad, has never had any real momentum expect for when he wasn't running yet and his funds are running low. I'd say Huckabee makes a small chance, but I believe Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominate for 2008.

The primaries have started and the campaigns for the presidential nominations are in full swing.

Over the last couple of days we've been watching quite a lot of television: campaign speeches, debates and news shows. C-SPAN, cable's political channel, provides 24/7 coverage of all things political which is great.

Yesterday we saw the results of the New Hampshire primary coming in. The CNN reporting was a lot more interesting than the coverage of the New Hampshire local channel, at least as long as Lou Dobbs wasn't talking.

I'm looking forward to a year of many election events and it's fascinating to follow all this... only 6 more days until Michigan.