WASHINGTON: US presidential campaigns have certain rules: it’s best to be rich, famous, show verbal savvy in attacking your opponent, and to have served as a state governor rather than in Congress before aspiring for the Oval Office.

But this year’s campaign, even with nine months to go before the actual vote, has already proven the most unorthodox in history, and analysts predict more surprises are in store.

From the outset, the leading cast of characters is a motley crew: a former first lady is battling a junior black senator for the Democratic nod, while a conservative outcast who nearly ran out of money last year is closing in fast on the Republican nomination.

“They have rewritten the rules ... It has been a very unconventional year,” said analyst Darrell West, a professor at Brown University.

Longtime political insider Stephen Hess, who has worked for three presidents, said expectations have been so shaken up that it makes the future of the White House race to replace George Bush impossible to gauge.

“John McCain was counted out last summer, and to start again at this point is unprecedented,” Hess said of the 71-year-old Arizona senator who failed in his 2000 bid for president. “On the other side Obama — that’s a question that’s remarkable. That’s not even a phenomenon, it’s not a wave, it’s a movement,” said Hess of the 46-year-old Illinois senator seeking to become America’s first African-American president.

“That happens so seldom in politics that there’s hardly anyone around who can predict that, on the basis of what happened before.” Just six months ago, polls suggested that the White House battle was likely to play out between Clinton on the Democratic side and former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani on the Republican side.

But today it is long-shot darkhorse McCain who is in line for the Republican nod, having inexplicably overcome a scourge of criticism over his support for Bush’s Iraq policy and his failed bid to legalise illegal immigrants.

And the notion that women would turn out in droves to support a female for president has vanished into thin air as many Democratic women are flocking instead toward Obama.

Record turnout by young voters has dispelled the myth of an apathetic young electorate.

—AFP