Questions about the campaign

The long winter of our political discontent has finally begun in earnest - the Iowa caucuses are over!

Virtually no one likes the system by which we select our president every four years. Since the mid-1970s the nation has been held hostage by lil' old Iowa and frosty New Hampshire, combined populations 4.4 million, as they tell the other 300 million of us who we should elect.

OK, you can't really blame the states or the people who live in them. It's the national media frenzy surrounding the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary which is really to blame for the disproportionate attention paid to these two first-in-the-nation presidential tallies.

Unfortunately, the press corps - which didn't get anything right in its analysis of the Iowa caucus prior to Thursday's vote - will still sway thousands of voters in New Hampshire to change their votes based on new theories of "inevitability," "momentum," and "destiny." They will also continue to make grand statements such as, "No one expected Mike Huckabee to win in Iowa," when what they really mean is "No one in the press expected Huckabee to win in Iowa."

If you want to know where things stand in the presidential election race, do yourself a favor and research the positions of the candidates on the issues instead of their position in the polls. If we don't have enough gumption to vote for the candidate we think is best for the job, we probably don't have any reason to be voting at all.

Speaking of which, you could have watched campaign coverage non-stop for the past three months and you still would know virtually nothing about these candidates except what they themselves wanted you to know. Has any network done an in-depth interview with the candidates where they asked the kinds of questions that you would ask in a job interview for even a desk clerk or an account manager?

Doesn't anyone want to know what Barack Obama did in the Illinois state legislature? Is anyone going to make Hillary Clinton account for those missing eight years in the White House? How about the Republicans? Shouldn't Huckabee be grilled directly about the taxes he raised in Arkansas? Should we let him off the hook with a glib answer and a quote from a newspaper article? How does Romney call himself a Reagan conservative and still tout the mandatory health-insurance plan he passed in Massachusetts? When did President Reagan support bigger, more intrusive, government and more entitlements?

The list could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Iowa and New Hampshire are only as important as we make them, or as important as we let CNN, MSNBC and Fox News make them. Don't just be a political bobblehead, nodding along as Wolf Blitzer or Tim Russert tells you what it all means.

Do your homework, get involved, and question everything. And if you don't like the idea that Iowa and New Hampshire will have a significant role in picking our next president, then insist on change, and start working today to get a better system in place four years from now.