Editor's note: The column below contains inaccurate information
about the timing of Maine’s Democratic Party Caucus. Only the
Republican Caucus takes place between the Jan. 29 Florida Primaries and
the Feb. 5 “Super Tuesday” contests. The Maine Democratic Party Caucus
is scheduled for Feb. 10.





Well, it’s over. Tuesday’s primary election campaign in New Hampshire,
which began approximately four years ago is the closest Maine gets to
having some influence in the selection of the next President – and we
didn’t even get to vote.


If it weren’t for the fact that television and radio signals bleed over
state lines, Mainers would probably never see a campaign ad and you may
have noticed those have stopped since the candidates limped and skipped
out of New Hampshire at approximately 12:01 a.m. Wednesday – or as in
Rudy Giuliani’s case, 8:15 p.m.


Nobody cares what Maine thinks about the presidential candidates. To
sum up all the reasons why, we’d have to throw out the old
three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule.


Maine is a small state with few delegates to be seated at the
convention. Being a small state does not preclude influence over the
selection process, as Iowa proved last week and New Hampshire proved
again on Tuesday, but it is just one strike.


Maine’s caucus happens to be a few days after the big Florida primary
and a few days before the Super-Tuesday orgy of primaries and caucuses
in as many as 22 states, ensuring Maine will get overlooked for all but
a microsecond of the news cycle. Strike two.


Maine also uses a caucus to select delegates to the convention and I
have concluded due to my first-hand experience at the 2004 Democratic
Caucus (what can I say? I really liked Howard Dean) that caucuses are
dumb. If you’ve ever been to one, and chances are you haven’t because
they are dumb, you know what a frustrating and seemingly pointless
exercise it is. As one of the losing candidates in Iowa put it, a
caucus is an auction, not an election – governed more by group dynamics
and the politics of a high school cafeteria – an anachronism left over
from a period of time when party affiliation was an activity, not just
dinner conversation. The process is disorienting and sometimes, as in
my case, those in charge aren’t all that sure of the rules themselves
(my precinct captains or whatever they are called ended up getting
wrong the mathematical formula required for us to know whom we voted
for). If you know who you’re voting for, it seems like a big waste of
time especially when you’re not in the popular crowd. If you don’t know
who you are voting for, having some dirty hippie yell “Kucinich!
Kucinich!” in your face until you do decide is an awful way to choose a
candidate. Boo caucuses! Yeah elections! Strike three.


Maine’s demography being abnormally white, old and white (yes, we are
that white) is not representative of the rest of the country (again
here it helps to be either Iowa or New Hampshire). Strike four.


Geographically and infrastructurally, Maine is an incredibly difficult
state in which to campaign, with huge distances between small
populations serviced by bad roads. If it weren’t for strikes one
through four, maybe the candidates would consider it, but that’s not
the case and there it is: strike five.


Having watched several of the debates and more trite campaign ads then
I care to enumerate, maybe Maine is blessed to be overlooked. The
Republicans seem to be running for Secretary of Homeland Security
rather than President of the United States.


The Democrats seem to be in a contest to see who can use the words “hope” and “change” the most times in a single sentence.


But, it is natural that the candidates vying for their party’s nomination would sound similar.


After years of inept imperialism and cabal capitalism, many people are
ready to choose hope over fear and change over more of the same.What
Republicans can run on is somewhat limited, given the legacy of the
last seven years and the Democrats simply want to remind voters that
they are not Republicans.


The commentary surrounding the nomination race confirms what everyone
knows but cannot figure out how to stop: political pundits don’t have
the slightest idea what regular people think even though they
constantly act as if they do. There is a shamelessness and hypocrisy
that permeates the endless handicapping of the various candidates. If
they were held to the same consistency and accountability they demand
from the candidates, they’d all be out of jobs.


It wasn’t too long ago that many of these people seemed to suggest we
could skip the primaries and head straight for the Clinton-Giuliani
general election.


Giuliani? Yes he’s still running. He just decided he could phone it in
for those little early states and it showed in the results, garnering
just 9 percent – one quarter of McCain’s total – a guy who was porting
his own bags during his summer campaign stops.


Rudy must have been listening to those pundits who decided his only
real competition is Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson (who received about
3,000 of the more than 500,000 votes cast) – Huckawho?


On the Democratic side, between New Year’s Day and approximately 9 p.m.
on Tuesday, Candidate Hillary Clinton went from inevitable, to damaged,
to doomed, to the Comeback Kid. Just before the polls closed at 8 p.m.,
the prognosticators were wondering just how big the Obama victory would
be. Before the Jan. 3 Iowa Caucus, Obama and Edwards were supposed to
duke it out in New Hampshire for a respectable second place, but now
the focus is not on the fact that he beat Edwards by 20 points, but
that he lost to Clinton by two.


But who cares what these pundits said three days ago in Manchester –
Michigan holds their primary on Tuesday! But their delegates might not
be allowed in the convention! Because they broke party rules! But who
cares! We have a horserace to watch! Go Seabiscuits!