If you’re a Democrat who thinks everything that has happened since 2000 was just a nightmare, check out this analysis from Politico on the possibility of Barack Obama pulling an Al Gore–and I’m not talking about winning a Noble Prize.

What are the chances that Obama could win the popular vote but lose the election? Not very good, but for Democrats, if it were to happen again, especially after eight years of George Bush, I think the heads of roughly 50 million voters would explode the morning of November 5.

With John McCain’s win in Florida, for the first time in around seven years, I am reminded of the amazing benefit of the electoral college and all that it has spawned in American politics - in particular the primary process that mirrors it. If it were not for the small rural states that began the primaries, we could have ended up with Rudy Giuliani in the White House.

When Giuliani decided on his “big state” strategy to win the Republican nomination, I was skeptical, yet nervous. I am not a fan of the overwhelming power that Iowa and New Hampshire hold in the presidential election process and think we need a change, but at the same time, I realize the benefit it provides in letting states that are not New York, California and Florida actually have a say in the election process.

If it were not for the state-by-state primary process, everything that is not a major coastal population center (including the Great Lake coasts), would get ignored almost entirely. For a while, I was worried that Giuliani had figured a way to outsmart the conventional wisdom of campaigning in the cornfields and living rooms and that the man who doesn’t include more to a sentence than a noun, a verb and 9/11 might actually end up winning the nomination. However, tonight, after the 2000 election when the electoral college elevated the Moron to the Oval Office, its little sister, the state-by-state primary starting with Iowa and New Hampshire has redeemed the process.

For full disclosure, I am a red state liberal who happens to prefer city life personally. I have spent around 4/5 of my life living in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi even though I now live in New York. So while I hated to see Bush lose the popular vote and win the White House in 2000, I understood why the process is the way it is - unlike Hillary Clinton and her shrill screeches against it in her first year in the Senate. Without the electoral college and the states’ primary process, the voices of Iowans and Nebraskans and Alabamians and others would be lost amid the glamor and glitz of New York and Los Angeles-based campaigns.

Now, with McCain’s win in Florida due to the momentum he built up winning in the great states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, maybe Giuliani can realize that all those people he ignored and didn’t care about in Iowa and New Hampshire actually do matter. If you want to be president of these United States, you can’t just understand life in the city; you also have to understand life in the country. This country is about more than New York and L.A. It’s about Omaha and Birmingham and Tulsa and Portsmouth and Cedar Rapids and thousands of other small cities and towns across the country.

Go back to New York, Rudy. The rest of the country doesn’t want you there either.