Hi. I’d like to be your presidential candidate for 2032. I think by then I’ll have enough state and national legislative and/or executive experience to be constructive in Washington, and I need to start raising money now.

A bit premature, you say? Perhaps. Except for the money thing, as a personal wealth of less than six figures probably isn’t going to get me very far to start out with. This example, though, points to what was one of the bigger talking points of the last few weeks of 2002 — the list of those hoping to make George W. Bush into a one-term president like his father.

The 2004 Iowa caucus is exactly one year from Sunday, and there are only 53 weeks until the New Hampshire primary Jan. 27. Four years ago, in the midst of the Clinton impeachment trial, plans were being made for a straw poll at the Iowa State Fair.

A political news summary from ABCNews last weekend had a section full of candidates’ plans to visit Iowa. Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt, two months after seeing his party soundly thumped in the midterm elections, has thrown his hat into the ring in an attempt to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen next time. He’s coming to the Linn County Sustaining Banquet on

Jan. 18 with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

The real question there is, sustaining what?

In Dean’s case, it would have to be his stamina. For the past year he’s been as close to Burlington, Iowa, about as often as he’s been close to Burlington, Vermont.

In the first eight months of 2002, according to a Sept. 3 article in USA Today, he made 19 trips to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina combined. An Associated Press article Dec. 17 chronicled his 16th visit to this state alone. Dean left office this month for full-time campaigning.

Not having other constituents to worry about may be an advantage, but on the other hand, he’s farther outside the Beltway (so to speak) than those starting campaigns while working for their home state.

In the month since that Dec. 17 article, Gephardt, Kerry, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman have all committed to running. Kerry has already signed up former House candidate John Norris to be the Iowa campaign manager with help from Norris’ wife, a former operative for Al Gore.

It will be Norris’ job to make sure the minority of people who voted for him in the 2002 election — and those in the other four Iowa House districts — vote for someone from a state that makes Leonard Boswell look like a moderate Republican and Jim Leach a solid conservative.

This is in contrast to Dean’s campaign, an attempt to convince Iowans to select the man whose state also elected a socialist to the House and a senator that ditched his party.

Those situations might make Gephardt more appealing, since South Dakota’s Tom Daschle is about the only prospective candidate to announce he will not run.

But how much will any of that matter? That’s a collection of well-known names up there, and that means there will be a lot of weeding out even before the calendar turns to the actual election year.

Elizabeth Dole, who placed third in the State Fair straw poll, quit before Halloween in 1999. While that may not be a fair way to characterize the fallout that may happen in 2003 — the playing field between Republicans then and Democrats now is vastly different — it may foreshadow just how dated this column may be by even Thanksgiving. (For the record, there are fewer days between now and Thanksgiving than Thanksgiving and the 2004 election.)

Throughout the past 25 years, the primary and caucus season has become so top-heavy that even Super Tuesday became too late to matter. Any state that held voting after that was just doing something as anticlimactic as Iowa’s last touchdown against USC.

In the latter case, many of the fans had already left the stadium; in the former, many of the early supporters — and candidates! — had already returned to their day jobs. We have ended up with conventions that are nothing but vast PR extravaganzas in the middle of what, by then, is already the middle of a multi-season barrage of political ads.

While efforts have been made in the past to hold off early primaries and stop the widening of the gap between selection of the candidate and final selection of the president, they have not gone far enough. Without real reform soon, there will be an even bigger mess in the years to come.

If nothing happens, and Bush does capture a second term 21 months from now, there may be a lot of pundits drooling over Hillary Clinton before the calendar hits 2005.

And by the way, did I mention I’m collecting for my 2012 state House bid?

Jeff Morrison is a junior in journalism and mass communication and political science from Traer. He is a copy editor at the Daily.