The Enemy Here Is The Press

And those vaunted, useless pundits, in exaggerating, beyond belief, the importance of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary:

All right, you say, why should the rest of us care? Couldn't the other 98 percent of Americans simply rise up and proclaim that they intend to make their own decisions? No one is forced to have their primary vote determined by what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire, after all.

But while we are not literally forced, the imperious campaign press will do all it can to coerce us into narrowing our choices. Like Roman emperors glaring contemptuously at a collection of wounded gladiators, then turning their thumbs down as the crowd roars its assent to the execution, they will pronounce candidates dead on the judgment of a few thousand Iowans. No appeals to mercy or reason will be allowed once the judgment is rendered. They will spend a day or two describing the demise of the candidates who came in third and fourth, then ignore them completely as though they no longer exist. Technically, you could still vote for them in your primary, but any choice other than the two candidates the press proclaims to still be viable, they will tell you, is as pointless as walking into a Starbucks and asking for a cup of Postum.