Undecided states

If you were to ever try and explain the primary process to someone who did not understand it, chances are you will develop a severe migraine. It is a mind-numbing process where you have to suspend logical thought and practicality in order to get emotionally invested. Luckily for us, the media has no problem doing this.

Now, to be fair, you can’t really blame the media for our country’s absurd method of picking presidential nominees (or presidents, for that matter). It’s not like they diagrammed this painful, never-ending process. However, they do play a substantial role in making some votes more important and meaningful than others.

Take the first few primaries for example. Unless your name was Rudy Giuliani, all of the focus was on Iowa and New Hampshire. Media attention was turned to these two states in hopes of lauding either a Republican and/or a Democrat as the front-runner. Fortunately for ratings purposes, that didn’t happen.

Then came Super Tuesday. John McCain was declared victorious while Obama and Clinton were now locked in a dead heat.

Now we are told that Ohio and Texas are the two most important states. My point is simply this: by arbitrarily assigning states more importance than others (or even states that held primaries before), isn’t the media, in essence, disregarding everyone else’s vote. Since Obama and Clinton are neck-and-neck, and Ohio and Texas could deal a fatal blow to the Clinton campaign, doesn’t that make every other state’s vote meaningless? The primary season drags on for such an excruciatingly long time that candidates are forced to run in each and every state. If no clear-cut winner emerges, then the primary held in that state didn’t really do anything of value.

Again, that is more of a problem with the primary process itself, but the media can’t help but sit back and buy into it and, in turn, forcing us to buy into it as well.

But hey, at least Ohio and Texas benefit. They may end up picking who the Democratic nominee will be (as an aside, that may shatter the world record for irony as the chances of either Texas or Ohio voting Democratic in the November election is about as likely as John McCain picking Rush Limabugh to be his running mate).

And even if they don’t, we’ll just pack it in and hope the next state can make up our minds for us.