It's a new year and I've shaken the dust of a weird 2007 out of my eyes. Thanks to the good folks at MOLI, in 2008, I get to indulge an interest in the anthropomorphic antics of our nation's would-be leaders. Really, it's not much different than watching the fascinating critters on the Discovery Channel. That's what I've learned from a recent inundation of cable news.
     The first thing I realized watching the overload of coverage on the Iowa caucus on CNN and Fox News is that a) it's fun to watch freezing reporters from Atlanta and Los Angeles hounding the roughly three Iowans who plan to participate with the same inane questions and b) the primary system is seriously out of whack because white America still can't quite deal with its brown people.    
     This was clear as the day rolled on and each news station kept recycling the same story -- 24-year-old Meredith Emerson disappeared in rural Georgia while hiking with her black Lab. "She may have met up with a stranger on Blood Mountain," intoned a CNN anchor, in his bid to deliver the opening lines of the latest Stephen King novel.
     The tragic hiker's blond-haired, blue-eyed cherub's face smiled from a blurry family photo. A potential suspect was described as a 60-year-old "badly weathered" man with long straggly silver hair and missing teeth, traveling with a mysterious red dog named Danny. They kept breaking in again and again with this folkloric non-story. Seriously? We really need to be kept up to the minute on this?
     It's a cliché at this point to note that the national media loves them a pretty white girl when it comes to damsel-in-distress stories. But as the stations kept flipping between Emerson's blond hair and Iowa's caucus, I started to resent my news being held hostage by these narrow representations of American life.

     Of course, I'm biased. I live in Miami, where 60 percent of the population is foreign-born, and most of the rest are second generation immigrants. Miami is ahead of the national curve in the sense that we've already had our first and second waves of overwhelming Hispanic immigration and are now at the point where the first-wave Hispanics complain about the second and third waves.
      We are a glimpse of America's complicated future. The same could be said of Florida in general and the other big, multi-ethnic states like California, New York, and Texas. What's happening with immigration in the South and the Southwest, and even in the heartland indicates that we're nearing the end of the era where we can afford to ignore our own evolution.
     This is good news, actually. As this applies to presidential politics, it means that America's illusions of itself as based on a small-town, folksy culture are about done. That's the whole shtick with having the first primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, two small, lily-white states with miniscule turnouts.
     Those who argue for this system say that it forces the candidates to engage voters diner by greasy diner. Rather than simply launching mega-media campaigns with clear advantages to the big-bucks leaders, candidates have a more or less equal shot at gaining early momentum in small state campaigns. The perfect example of who this benefits is aspirants like Mike Huckabee, who seemed destined for also-ran status until Iowans took a shine to him and ruffled the Mitt Romney perfect-hair offensive.
     On the other hand, Iowa and New Hampshire are not particularly representative of the rest of America and states like Florida are sick of it. So it and Michigan and eventually a whole gang of renegades rushed the stage a few months ago by setting early primary dates and upending the political calculus of the parties and candidates.
     Susan McManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, told me that one reason the primary system has kept putting along like a model T on the autobahn is that candidates like it that way. The condensed calendar of primaries means that they have to spend a lot more money and time in each state at once.
     If we went to a national primary date, the cost would rival that of the November popularity contest. "They would have to burn as much in the primary as they would for the general election," she said.
     But obviously, something's got to give in the broken system we have now, whether a Democrat or a Republican takes the white House. The other point to make here is that a lot of this primary stuff is pretty silly considering that at bottom; most candidates will be spending the bulk of their resources on the dozen or two battleground states that actually decide the contest.
     Each party assumes it will carry either the red or the blue states, so the only voters with real power live in the conflicted purple states. As more people realize that, we can only hope more states will discover that allowing the colors to bleed is the best strategy for combating the apathy of both voters and candidates.