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Under out current system, the media annoint the "serious" candidates long before the first votes are ever cast.
Paul, Gravel, Kucinich, Richardson, Dodd and Huckabee all have one thing in common - their candidacies were pronounced DOA by the media.
Paul and Huckabee are the only ones that have been able to defy that diagnosis, perhaps because of the lack of quality of the “serious” candidates in the GOP. Paul raises more money than his competitors but still gets ignored, and the right-wing smear machine is gearing up to destroy Huckabee now that he is rising in the polls.
Ultimately, we are forced to choose between one of two candidates that most of us had little hand in choosing. I live in California and have voted in every election since 1978, but every Presidential primary (in both parties) has been over before I got a chance to vote.
Maybe someday the voters rather than the media will get to decide which candidates are “serious” and which issues are important.
