Every four years we are lucky enough to be a part of this little phenomenon called election year. Blasted by political advertisements on TV, radio and newspaper, Iowa becomes a national battleground for the election just because of our seven little electoral votes.

Scratch that — those “little” votes are extremely important.

Iowa’s seven electoral votes have identified it as a swing state in this year’s election, as well as elections in the past. Because of our swing- state status, there isn’t a day on which no candidates or supporters are speaking in Iowa and bashing the other guy or raising money.

I’ve selected two important issues that will help you decide which presidential candidate you should vote for. The first issue is jobs and the economy (or economy and jobs, depending on the candidate), and it’s a big one.

This is something that affects us all, whether we want it to or not. For President Bush, the top two items under jobs and the economy are to create more jobs and institute tax reforms. His Web site states he will “make the tax code simpler for taxpayers, encourage saving and investment, and improve the economy’s ability to create jobs and raise wages.”

He had four years to do that. In fact, 1.8 million jobs were lost during Mr. Bush’s reign. On John Kerry’s Web site, the first two items of importance are to create more good-paying jobs and cut taxes for middle-class families. Kerry claims that he can create 10 million new jobs in his four years as president.

For the economy, do we trust someone who has already failed to improve our economy and has proven he will do nothing to help, or do we trust someone whose claims are not backed up by any plans?

The second key issue is education, and it’s vital to the United States in many different ways. Revamping the education system will help create jobs, address dire social problems and help advance our society in technology, energy solutions and the environment. Many of the other issues in this presidential election are directly related to the lack of education in this country.

Bush says he’s taking a bold new direction in education reform. He’s right — Bush is taking us into a bold new direction of underfunded educational institutions.

Colleges all over the country are looking to private sponsors for funding because the states are broke, thanks to the lack of funding from the federal government.

Kerry suggests that he can make education affordable and keep “schools open ’til six.” He also says that creating a trust fund will help us meet our responsibilities to our schools by keeping the level of funding consistent and ensuring schools have enough money to operate. He promises to make college affordable by offering “fully refundable College Opportunity Tax credit on up to $4,000 of tuition for every year of college.”

This sounds pretty good, but we know that annual tuition almost everywhere is more than 4,000 big ones. Something is not working correctly — Bush has largely failed on the education issue, but Kerry does not provide an appetizing alternative.

Both candidates keep me looking elsewhere for the real presidential candidates.

After reading these points, one must ask the question: “Will the real presidential candidate please stand up?” Our country is in an uncertain time now; we are isolating ourselves from the world, at war with ourselves and at war in Iraq.

We now find ourselves in political frenzy where we are disillusioned by the speeches and the fund-raising steak fries with free beer. We have seemingly forgotten about the issues and are taking sides with candidates just because they are against a different candidate.