I gotta hand it to the American system of preselection:  no chance of an abnormally interesting human being ever slipping through your net!

As a stranger, outside the room with their nose pressed up against the glass, I thought I'd jot down the following observations.

Dems:

Apparently Hillary has more than $50 mill on hand? Can she afford the best issues? She looks a bit smarmy to me. Big money. A front runner. I just don't go for front runners by nature.

Did the democrats fill the bottom of their ticket with the shortest names they could find? - ‘Joe John Chris Mike and Bill are easy so we'll go with that', eh?

{I s'pose ‘Dennis' blows the above theory}

Who the hell is Bill Richardson and why does he look like Barney Rubble? (or is it just a bad shot?)

Apparently it's considered bad form to say ‘that rich black fella running for president' when talking about Obama. (I'm sorry I wasn't being rude.) It sounds good but unlikely. Maybe in season nineteen of the West Wing.

Biden's web presence alerts me to the fact that he has just surged past Richardson in Iowa. Will there be a speeding fine involved? Is it possible to speed past an indeterminate object whistling past in the same and opposite directions all at the same time?

John Edwards (who is far too nice for all this sh**) should go home and run an organic goose farm.

Chris Dodd has very serious eyebrows!

GOP:

(I'll ignore the bloke from Law and Order)

Mike Huckabee can't win because of his name (being an obnoxious right wing religious prat is par for the course apparently).

New York is kinda like only New York so Rudi is just way too foreign.

Duncan Allan Ron and Tom don't look like stayers.

Mitt has nothing about group marriage on his web site?

Maybe a fiver on Duncan? Has to be good odds going!

John is a good solid name. But isn't McCain a democrat? And if he isn't - why isn't he?

I don't like any of them much.