Summarizing presidential primary news from a number of sources, we have Jeb Bush power-surging on an unavoidable trajectory to first place. He has three delegates. Don’t tell anybody, but an invisible candidate named Ben Carson has the same number. Shhhh. In Iowa, Marco Rubio clearly was the winner, coming in third place, next to who knows what. Don’t say I said so, but another invisible candidate, Ted Cruz, came in first in Iowa and then third in New Hampshire. He is now second to another unmentionable, Donald Trump – but any rank for Cruz amounts to being in last place because he can’t get anybody to vote for him.

Over on the Democrat side, third place was cause to drop out, rather than to be declared the victor in Iowa. Hillary is by far the winner of this ever-so Democratic Party following the New Hampshire primary, with 394 delegates to Bernie Sanders’ 42. That’s because of all the superdelegates she has that have nothing to do with the voice of the people. Sanders, a total noncontender, lost New Hampshire with a piddling 60 percent of the vote.

The moral of the story is, vote your conscience, and if you care what other people think, as in whether you’re trying to decide in which primary – or even which state – to vote, please check the numbers online. TV/radio people are applying non-Euclidean algorithms to Klein-bottle topologies and randomizing negative numbers.

P.S. For people who don’t want to be exposed to political media eighteen hours a day, two rules of thumb I would offer would be: (1) If a crony says they can’t work with a candidate, it means the guy is principled. The phrase, or something like it, proliferated in Atlas Shrugged. (2) If the only reason offered to vote for somebody is something like, “He can win,” “He can raise a lot of money,” or “He can beat so-and-so” – find somebody else. Lastly, I want a president who knows his place. Quoting from Gene Healy’s False Idol:

There’s a reason the Capitol Dome dominates the D.C. landscape, towering over the comparatively modest presidential residence down the street. The capital’s design mirrors the constitutional architecture, in which Congress, not the executive, was supposed to be the prime mover in setting national policy.

Incidentally, a copy of this book, because of its importance, is being made available free at Cato.org.