Now that the Iraq war is over, you're gonna be hearing a lot more from me about the presidential campaign. But you'll have to look elsewhere if you're into the horse race, you TiVo the debates so you can play them over and over, or care about who Hillary will choose to be a running mate nine fricking months before the conventions.
My perspective will continue to be that the system by which we elect our presidential is badly broken. In that spirit, I've already posted mud pies on the complicity of the mainstream media in this broken-ness and why 200,000 white Iowans with no fashion sense and high cholesterol levels may have more to say about who the next occupant of the Oval Office is than anyone else.
This brings me to today's installment on an ancillary of the Iowa Idiocy and one of the more insidious aspects of the system – the way it is being front-loaded more than ever this cycle as an increasing number of states schedule early primaries.
Florida, which has moved its presidential primary from May to late January despite meaningless threats of sanctions from the Democratic National Committee, is Exhibit A in this regard.
Florida may be the fourth most populous state, but it has already played too big of a role in recent presidential elections. Its move to advance its primary to give it a greater voice in the nominating process has the signal result of making it even more difficult for cash-strapped candidates to compete in a slaughter house where survival depends more on their ability to raise obscene amounts of money than run an issues-based campaign with real revelance.
Take Pennsylvania. Please!Pennsylvania is the sixth most populous state, but its late April primary means that presidential candidates have no reason to campaign there except for flybys where they to take a limo from the airport to spend an hour raising money at an invitation-only event before hightailing it back to Iowa (the 30th most populous state), New Hampshire (41st most populous) or someplace else that counts no matter its size and significance because it is a participant in the orgy.
Then there is Nevada (35th most populous) which will hold its first presidential caucuses of consequence on January 19 after the Iowa caucuses on January 3 and the New Hampshire primary on January 8.
Now I have to admit that there is a certain appeal to the possibility of the Nevada caucuses having an outsized significance if no clear leaders emerge from Iowa and New Hampshire.
This is because Nevada is a rising center of the American West as opposed to, say, Florida, which is so yesterday and has found more ways to screw up the process -- notably on the back end -- than perhaps any single state.
Democracy in action? Well maybe.
There was the Fred Thompson boomlet, which turns out to have been a fig newton of the MSM's imagination given that the guy has barely shown a pulse in the seven weeks since he belatedly announced his run for the Republican roses.
There was the tsumani of stories that the Family Values crowd would abort (pun intended) Rudy Giuliani's campaign, the upshot of which has been the Reverend Pat Robertson lip locking with America's Mayor. There is talk of other kindred spirits getting on board the bandwagon, which in a perverse way helps explain why Giuliani is considered a front runner despite the increasing number of revelations about his amoral and scandalous past.
But as Frank Rich notes in his New York Times op-ed column yesterday, these examples pale in comparison to the biggest MSM flapdoodle of them all: That Hillary Clinton's nomination is all but inevitable because of her "textbook perfect" and "tightly disciplined" campaign.
Rich compares this with coverage of the Barack Obama campaign:
"The Washington wisdom about Mr. Obama has often been just as wrong as that about Mrs. Clinton. We kept being told he was making rookie mistakes and offering voters wispy idealistic sentiments rather than the real beef of policy. But what the Beltway mistook for gaffes often was the policy.
"Mr. Obama’s much-derided readiness to talk promptly and directly to the leaders of Iran and Syria, for instance, was a clear alternative, agree with it or not, to Mrs. Clinton’s same-old Foggy Bottom platitudes on the subject. His supposedly reckless pledge to chase down Osama bin Laden and his gang in Pakistan, without Pakistani permission if necessary, was a pointed rebuke of both Mrs. Clinton’s and President Bush’s misplaced fealty to our terrorist-enabling 'ally,' Pervez Musharraf. Like Mr. Obama’s prescient Iraq speech of 2002, his open acknowledgment of the Pakistan president’s slipperiness turned out to be ahead of the curve."
Rich notes the MSM's inability to get into a groove on Obama has a lot to do with him being of mixed race and the built-in story line that fact provides despite the fact that who his parents are means far less to the average voter than the media could possibly imagine. This has not stanched the flow of stories to the effect that Obama may be too black for whites and too white for blacks.
But I think it runs much deeper than that: Beyond his electability -- which is very much an open question -- Obama is the only candidate on either side who is truly a fresh face at a time when voters are desperately craving one.
And the MSM has been incapable of understanding his appeal because it is incapable of understanding that.
Some JFK biographers say that the statement was a turning point and, as one put it, "he knocked religion out of the campaign as an intellectually respectable issue."Meanwhile, Mitt Romney travels to
It worked for JFK, but will it work for Romney?
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