Secondly, letter-writer to the Washington Post Kenneth R. Insley Jr. proposed a truly innovative, original, and downright brilliant idea for how to solve the presidential primary schedule mess for good:

I believe the fairest way to conduct the presidential primaries would be to rank the states according to voter participation in the previous election and have the primaries in that order until the winners become obvious.

He gets a bit snarky at the end, but still, his idea has a lot of merit, and is worth considering:

This change might rankle the chosen people of Iowa and New Hampshire because they would have to finally earn their coveted positions of influence. As soon as either of those states acquires an actual city, a diverse population or even a major sports team, I might actually feel the opinions held there should count for as much as my own.

Of course, like many good political reform ideas, it probably makes too much sense to ever become reality.

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In other news, Richard Perle seems to be writing comedy for the Washington Post. He writes an op-ed in which he claims that George Tenet personally stole all Saddam's WMD and hid them so that President Bush would look bad. Or something. Like I said, either it was written as a satire, or Perle is convinced he can personally rewrite history. You be the judge.

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Rend Al-Rahim's got the best idea I've heard in a long time for some sort of acceptible solution to the whole problem of Iraq: convene a Dayton-type meeting with all the factions, and hammer out an agreement they can all live with. Who knows what the chances of success would be, but like I said, this is the first truly original idea I've heard in a long time, so it deserves to be debated, at the very least.

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The time has come to federalize presidential elections.

I do not call lightly for this step, and realize it would face an uphill fight to becoming reality. It would probably require amending the Constitution, which is always tough. This doesn't mean it isn't worth attempting, or that it won't eventually happen.

The federal government must take control of the election process for the presidential elections, including the primaries. This would simultaneously solve two problems that have been getting successively worse with each election cycle: the primary calendar race to the front of the line, and the questionable voting practices in certain areas of the country.

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While much has been said about the French elections, the thing that struck me was the fact that 85% of them turned out to vote. In our last presidential election, south of 60% exercised their franchise. Maybe it has something to do with scheduling the voting on a weekend, instead of a Tuesday? Just a thought....

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The symbolism of a Republican crowd sitting in "Geneva" is bad enough, given George W. Bush's penchance for ignoring international laws (especially those which emanated from Geneva), but am I the only one to see shades of Kafka or Orwell in GOP audience members sitting in "Moscow"?

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Now, this doesn't mean I'm about to vote Republican or anything, but Romney raised his profile considerably (for me) when he told Jay "my sons just gave me a car as a present -- a 1962 Rambler American."

For context (for those of you who don't know me personally), here is the car I learned to drive on:

A not-so beautiful 1968 Rambler American. Man, if that car could talk....

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Whatever happens, some folks will be happy with the results, and others will not. That's a certainty. What may come out of these experiments is a push afterwards to lessen the chaos by instituting some intelligent presidential election reforms. There are many good proposals to do this, but two of the most sensible directly address the primary calendar problems.

The first I have previously written about. It was proposed by Jimmy Carter and James Baker in their blue-ribbon commission report on elections. It essentially says: let the early states continue to go first; but instead of having one national primary, divide the country into four regions. All the states in each region would vote on the same day, and each region would vote about a month apart. Whichever region goes first in each election would rotate to the back of the line for the next election, cycling all the regions into first place (once every four elections).

The second idea would be to just give up and have a national primary.

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I have limited this article to examining declared non-frontrunners in the Democratic race, as you will have noticed. I refuse to take the bait from prominent Democrats toying with the media by playing the "will he or won't he run" game (paging Al Gore...). Tom Vilsack was briefly a candidate, but then pulled out when he realized that "favorite son of Iowa" wasn't going to raise him enough money. And Senator Russ Feingold has already disappointed me (he was my favorite) by announcing that he is not going to run. So I have examined the field as it stands. If the field changes, perhaps I'll revisit the issue.

In conclusion, I hope I have done what I can at this point to help make this a true race of ideas and positions, instead of just the usual beauty contest and money race. I think it's a shame the way elections are run in this country for our most important job, and I wish it were different (I'm a personal advocate of free television ads for all as a way to remove the influence of money from campaign politics). But in the world we live in, and with the soapbox I have here at Huffington Post, I'd like to think I have done what I could to help the "underdog" candidates (like many Americans, I'm a sucker for underdogs) get some valuable free media exposure and, by doing so, get their message out to the voters.

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So, in the hopes that their names don't completely disappear from the media's radar, I hereby present a rundown of the "second tier" of Democratic presidential candidates. The way I figure it (barring any huge surprises), this may be the last time any of these candidates are taken seriously by anybody, before they slowly disappear from the American voter's consciousness.

I think it's a shame (in general) that campaigns aren't run about ideas, but about money. So I am doing what I can to counteract that by examining ALL the Democratic candidates that the mainstream media are ignoring in the race. Of course, I have limited resources, so I have to rely on media reports and the candidates' own web pages in order to do so. I have tried to be fair, and present the campaigns as I see them after spending a bit of time looking at each one.

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