So what has happened to make the party pass him over and provoke an unprecedented walkout of the majority of its own activists from Tuesday night's selection meeting?
For the government, it is a test of Tony Blair's ability, honed over a decade, to make the Labour Party do things it doesn't particularly want to do.
Controversies aside, the mood in Rio de Janeiro was overwhelmingly one of celebration and, as if to make the point, they intend to repeat the party all over again on Monday night with another six samba schools.
As a result, any action in the Senate to approve such a reform effort is likely to kick off an inter-party war in the House that will make the battles inside the GOP caucus over the fiscal cliff, debt ceiling and tax increases for the 1 percent appear, by comparison, to be a walk in the park on Sunday.
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North Carolina is also hosting the Democratic National Convention, where Democrats were set to battle over whether to make gay marriage rights a plank of their party's official platform.
They have largely kept her away from the press, with the notable exception of interviews with ABC's Charlie Gibson and CBS's Katie Couric which demonstrated the perils of trying to give her an overnight public policy make-over, one that threatens to serve her, her party and the country poorly.
This argument, rather than the subsidiary battle over health insurance, is the one that the Conservative Party ought to make its priority.
Fearful of losing its grip entirely over villages or of provoking peasant unrest, the party is reluctant to make clear who is in charge.
What is sometimes less noticed is that the congressional Republicans are falling over themselves to make the state governors the dominant force in the party as a whole.
After the Republicans had their butts kicked by Hispanics and Asians over the anti-immigrant rants of extreme segments of their party, they badly want to make amends.
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The party will, in turn, need to make new demands of its subjects even as it loses its economic grip over them.
The opinion polls make particularly bad reading for the Labour Party and its minority government, led by Thorbjorn Jagland, who took over from Gro Harlem Brundtland as party leader and prime minister last October.
Visiting fans and their energy get absorbed and lost in the mix of a huge city, while less populous ones make much better venues, because the event takes over and transforms them into one big Super Bowl party.
For the party, she lined the blue doughnuts along a big piece of Lucite over a blue piece of wrapping paper to make it look like a pool.
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