It's an election year!

Well, 2008 is divisible by four, so it's leap year -- and election year. And an election year in Iowa is something to see! We have been bombarded with campaign ads for the last year on TV and in print (everyone is for the environment, but they've sure been killing trees!) The ads have sometimes been informative, but they've sometimes been downright scary; it you like Dick Cheney, you'll LOVE Mitt Romney.

Johnson County, Iowa, is a pretty Democratic area so, in generally pretty conservative Iowa, it's sometimes called "The People's Republic of Johnson County." Clearly they've never seen The People's Republic of Berkeley! There is probably a difference in the way the parties handle caucuses, but with six precincts in Coralville there are six different Democratic caucus sites but only one Republican site.

We've done our part to try to understand the issues and the (Democratic) candidates. We attended the Johnson County Democratic Picnic, went to an Obama rally at UI, and are going to a Richardson meeting tonight. I've never seen "retail politics" before -- politics where the candidate really makes an effort to talk with individuals instead of just using mass media -- except for local races; if all politics were done this way we'd have a lot smaller chance of electing hypocrits like the Current Occupant. The value of the Iowa process is that it forces candidates to communicate at the personal level, and it shouldn't be lost.

Tomorrow night we may walk over to our caucus at an elementary school about a half mile away. It should be very interesting, and I'll write about it here.

But even though almost all our Presidential election years have been leap years (pop quiz: in what years were Presidential election years NOT leap years?), at least we have the actual election on the first Tuesday in November so it can never fall on Sadie Hawkins Day...