I want some snark damnit! TBogg is just phoning it in!

No offense taken. Most of us welcome being ignored. Why the hell us do we live in Iowa? Frankly, we’ll just be happy to not have our phones ringing six or seven times a day. Believe me, most of us? We’re plenty soaked.

If the DNC and the RNC are smart (I know, I know …), they’ll fix the primary calendar mess and four years from now neither Iowa nor New Hampshire will be basking in the media spotlight.

And as a bonus, we might finally get an energy policy that doesn’t subsidize the burning of food in our cars.

With our luck, the first primary state in four years will be Delaware, giving Joe Biden’s Harold Stassen-like tenacity even greater reason to hope.

I’m afraid I don’t really care who wins the nominations of either party, because I have faith in two principles that have never let me down in all my years of voting:

1) The Democratic candidate will find a way to lose in November; and
2) Even if S/He doesn’t, the nominee will make an ineffectual President, who allows the Republicans to continue moving the goal posts ever rightward, to the point where, in 2012, the Republican nominee will be comfortable disavowing “liberals” like Reagan.

Next on every media channel in the universe:

Why the Iowa results don’t matter.

Hopefully, they’ll be smarter than to allow any one state to be “frist” on its own. The recent proposal by the Michigan Democratic Party to break the country up into a number of regional primaries, and hold a lottery to see which region goes first each cycle, seems both sensible and equitable.

Which, of course, means the idea is already doomed….

Regarding your pessimistic rules of thumb – I wish I had it in me to disagree in a robust fashion. I hope you’re wrong, as I’m sure you do, but I’m not holding my breath.

I for one think it’s a fine thing that Iowa and New Hampshire have such a disproportionate effect on the general election. Their homogeneous populations (Iowa is 94.9% white, New Hampshire is 96.1% white), and lack of dense urban areas ringed with suburbs make them the perfect place to winnow the presidential field for the rest of America. It’s no accident that the candidates from both parties are emphasizing mass transit, ecology, and the challenges of multiculturalism.

I live in Ioway because of the job, let’s get that straight.
Oh, and it’s a great place to be from. Meaning it’s easy to get to other places you’d rather be.
And while you might be led to believe that getting phone calls, multiple times daily, from one pud of a pol after another, is cool, it’s really not.

My sympathies, heydave.
I think we should have added politicians to the do not call list

If there’s ever a national butter carving or most barren landscape contest, Iowa would do just fine as first in the nation state. Until then…ehh.

I call me friend from Iowa at last once a year …but he lives in New Mexico now.

me=my

And I thought you were just trying to sound like Ringo Starr…

I’d love to know who Tbogg wants Iowa to choose as the Dem candidate, and who Tbogg wants to do better than expected.

Actually, the landscape doesn’t suck nearly as much as popular mythology would have you believe.
Well, sure, there are no mountains and no oceans.
And the motto of Lake City, I kid you not, is “Everything but a lake.”

But somehow this state managed to put the major thoroughfares of I-35 and I-80 though the most fugly boring areas you’d ever want to see.

For sheer slack jawed, deadpan dumb, however, I would kindly attract your attention to our neighbor, That Which Must Be Crossed to see mountains (at the cost of 9 hours of your life): Nebraska.

No contest.

Hey now! There are very beautiful parts of Nebraska. They also do not lie along the highway – but they do exist! Okay, so maybe not in the western part of the state….

For most boring to drive through, I nominate Kansas. For most depressing landscape? Oklahoma. Everything seems….stunted or twisted there.

Point(s) well taken.

Somewhere there must be that “somewhere” we can all feel better about.

Kind of like my job in my neighborhood: making the neighbors feel better about themselves.

I’m not a big Iowa fan, but geography-wise Illinois makes Iowa look like Colorado.