OK, don't get upset with me, but I feel that every so often I have to comment on what is going on in politics, because I think that it plays into all of our lives very closely. I don't necessarily mean that all of us will be partaking in supporting a candidate or even participating in the political process, but rather the ultimate truth that one of the candidates who is running will end up being chosen as the next president and that we all have to deal with that fact. I chose to bring this up now, because it seems like this week there has been a mad rush to announce political candidacy for the 2008 presidential race. I guess rightfully so since the elections will be about ten months from now.

So how does this rush of presidentialy candidates affect the rest of us? Well, in my opinion, depending on how politically active we want to be, it can have a great effect on all of us. One of the main goals that candidates have during this period before the election (actually before the primaries) is to get seen and to get heard. We all know that this costs lots of money and time. Candidates are looking for donations and for volunteers to get their name out there to the whole country. Having worked on a few small political campaigns back when I was in high school, I am very familiar with the tiny things that committees will have volunteers do that end up making a big difference. For example, a friend and I ended up spending twenty hours one weekend just sealing envelopes to mail out to potential voters, and we weren't even close to being done...and that was for a single city!

So, like I said, it's going to come down to money. There seem to be so many people who have just announced their candidacy and plenty of others who the general public has speculated will run for the office. Of course, this gives us plenty of people to choose from, whether we are liberal, conservative, or somewhere else on the political spectrum. But ultimately, some people will fall out of the running even before the primaries happen. Money will make or break a lot of the candidates. Less money means less professional staff, less television and radio commercials, less ability to travel on the campaign trail...less money does not a president make, for lack of a better way to say it.

Having become newly interested in the political process over the past several years, I will be very interested to see how things end up between now and the primaries. I'll be very interested to find out how much of a factor money really ends up being in the whole process. I'm also interested to know in which ways the pile of candidates gets whittled down as New Hampshire and Iowa roll around.

Now that I've said all of that, let's get down to the brass tacks...supporting a candidate. It's not exactly a Christian donation type of thing, but it is giving our money to someone, for potentially no return, right? If you do choose to pick a candidate to support with either your time or your money, as always, I urge you to do so wisely. Take a lot of the principles that I mentioned about donating to Christian charities and other organizations, and apply them to this situation as well. So many of the same ideas apply here. Make sure you know what a candidate stands for. Make sure you know where they've come from and to where they intend to lead the country. A really way to judge the character of a candidate is to look at his or her advertising materials. If they've resorted to mudslinging right off of the bat, rather than trying to play fair first, I'd go shopping for a new candidate sooner rather than later.