It goes down fast, as everyone shouts, “Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!” They each take turns on the “beer bong” as an old Guns N’ Roses CD plays on the stereo. In the morning, after tomorrow’s 8am checkout, they will be gone, on the road back to Ohio and their classes in computer programming and high finance, making room for the next round of fresh Spring Breakers.Brad has already had some luck over at Harpoon Harry’s, down on the strip. He’d only been at the bar for five minutes when a girl called him the sexiest man alive and offered to “make out”, right then and there Brad’s friend’s digital camera flashes. There on the screen is a glimpse of Brad’s face buried in the breasts of an anonymous girl There are 40 more like it. Here at the Howard Johnson Hotel, and its party compound, the cans float in the pool as a boozed-up young man climbs down from a second-floor balcony. A window above him is lined with bottles of spirits, and small rooms all over the hotel overflow with parties fuelled by drink and drugs, mingling students from America’s finest schools and its most obscure universities.Tonight, at least 23 young men are crowded inside 3108, all in a room that is about the size of a prison cell The furniture is stacked against a wall.

Hotel rooms across the city are decorated with empty cans stacked into great pyramids, standing as monuments to blind drunkenness and pointless endurance. So the boys in 3108 watch with frustration as the girls next door spend their days lying on the beach, stumbling back to the hotel to drink heavily after dark, while still refusing to hook up, feel up or sex up with anyone.No matter what the leering cameras of MTV and cable TV shows such as Girls Gone Wild promise, sex is not guaranteed But there is always beer. He will announce his decision on a Sunday talk show, associates said.. The girls next door must be lesbians – all seven of them – young and blonde, somehow managing to ignore the loud, drunk young men in room 3108.

They are nice enough to these boys from Ohio, amused even, but they will not succumb. Not even on this final night of binge drinking and reckless escape from the grim responsibilities waiting back at college. The Massachusetts senator is on course to win the four New England primaries that day. If he scores victories in California, New York and Ohio, it will be just about game, set and match, whatever happens in the other three states – Maryland, Minnesota and Georgia.If Mr Edwards can keep going, his last chance will surely come a week later on 9 March, when the “mega-states” of Florida and Texas finally hold their primaries.Either way, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic party chairman, says: “We expect to have a nominee by 10 March.” ¿ The consumer activist Ralph Nader is expected to start a new presidential bid this weekend, despite pleas from many Democrats to desist.

Mr Nader, whose 2.7 per cent of the vote may have cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000, would run as an independent. In retrospect, the decline of the former Vermont governor began almost precisely at that moment. The unions worked hard for their champion Richard Gephardt in Iowa, but much good it did him.With so little to separate them on the major issues – the two senators have virtually identical views on Iraq, rolling back part of Mr Bush’s tax cuts and expanding healthcare coverage – debates may now play a critical role.Hitherto Mr Edwards has not excelled in this format, his sharpness and folksy charm being largely lost as up to eight rivals have cluttered the stage and competed for attention. Mr Kerry will do his best to avoid further encounters, without giving the impression he is running from a fight.Ultimately, however, real votes cast by real voters on 2 March will decide matters. The American media, like their counterparts anywhere, want exciting political races and will do their best to promote one.But the media may be disappointed. A Marist College poll yesterday showed Mr Kerry leading by 66 points to 14 in New York state, the second largest of the 10 states holding primaries and caucuses on 2 March. The man from Massachusetts is also far ahead in California, Ohio, Connecticut, and even on Mr Edwards’ southern home turf of Georgia.Rumours have circulated that Mr Dean, who has never concealed his disdain for Mr Kerry as a prime specimen of the trimming and spineless “Washington Democrats”, might be preparing to endorse Mr Edwards.But Mr Kerry countered this week by winning the backing of the main union organisation here, the AFL-CIO – even though Mr Edwards, with his opposition to Nafta and other international trade agreements is far closer to the union’s position than his rival, who has consistently voted in favour of free trade during his 19 years in the Senate.And on the matter of endorsements too, conventional wisdom is not be what it once was.