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!