The news media are doing their quadrennial infuriating thing—insisting on making every presidential contest into a two-man race. The only difference this year is that with Hillary Clinton running, they’re trying to make the Dem side a two-person race. This they’ve been trying to do for a year, months before a single vote was cast.

It wd have been too much to hope that Iowa would stop them, or slow them down, and I had no such hope. Pundits, and the political reporters apparently forbidden by their producers and editors to contradict the pundits with too effective an insistence on accuracy, spent months discussing the 2008 election as though it were likely to be a contest between Hillary Clinton and Rudith Giuliani. For the last six months, they have discussed the Democratic primaries as though they were a contest between Clinton and Obama. For the past month, they have pitted Huckabee against Romney or sometimes, for a breather, Romney against McCain.

As the media hordes including their underqualified commentators head into New Hampshire, it’s more grating than ever.

Obviously any sensible person ought to sidestep this nonsense and to ignore it, and I wish I could. So here is my take on New Hampshire. On the GOP side, handicapping is complicated because there are actually three contests, even in the narrowest political terms. 1) The fundamental contest for Republicans, with an immoral, illegal and unconstitutional war on the Middle East and an assault on the middle class at home, is between Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and every other GOP candidate. For the moment, all the others are still lined up behind the Bush-Cheney war. Only Paul has made the honorable distinction between the Bush team and genuine conservatism. On the war, all the others cd be said to be represented by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), famously the only GOP candidate with actual war experience.

2) Not fundamental in the ideological sense but crucial is the divide between former Mass. governor Mitt Romney and former Tenn. senator Fred Thompson, on one hand, and all the other Republicans. For my money, Romney and Thompson are the only GOP candidates that the outgoing administration might conceivably support. Huckabee and McCain do not have the same aura of utter controllability. Not to overstate this distinction: McCain is indeed the Washington insider that Romney has argued he is. Even McCain’s going after Boeing, justified though it was, had the side effect of benefiting Lockheed Martin. But the administration tapped Romney and Thompson, not the others, for helping with the defense of Scooter Libby.

3) An awkward division for all of them: all of them except Ron Paul support the Iraq war, but only John McCain supports it unequivocally and has the military background to go with his position. It is hard to imagine how this stance could possibly win a general election. But the GOP field isn’t handling it well. All the rest are going along to get along—except Rep. Paul—but they’re not looking happy about it. They haven’t been able to make the break, yet—to call McCain on the futility of the Iraq invasion and occupation, and to buck the administration. Presumably they never will, which means they go into next November in loosely the same situation as Vice President Hubert Humphrey during Vietnam—except without a majority party.

Result? There are five Republicans going into New Hampshire—six, if you count Rudith Giuliani—and there will be five (or six) coming out of New Hampshire. (Barring the calamitous unforeseen, of course, like being videotaped dealing drugs, caught in a compromising position etc.)

Now for the Dems, the picture is smaller. ABC’s decision to exclude Dennis Kucinich from last night’s debate was loathsome. But the four candidates—Clinton, Edwards, Obama and Richardson—who were allowed in all sounded good. They all looked exhausted, naturally. But they are all viable candidates.

John Edwards has withstood months, months, of the corporate media treating him about as one would expect the top management of Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Oil to treat him. All the other candidates not Clinton or Obama have endured a near-shutout from the ignorant near-celebs who control political discourse on television. They all still sound good, when you can get to hear them.

Result? New Hampshire is not a must-win for anybody. Obama has more than enough money to move past any result; Clinton is apparently counting on New York and California; and Edwards is already being discounted by the media in New Hampshire anyway. (btw, it is really amazing to hear people like Brit Hume and war-booster Bill Kristol on Edwards—when they can be brought to mention his name. Even for Fox, there are new lows.)

N.b.: As though the line-up of commentators against Edwards were not enough—and apparently they fear it will not be enough—one pundit this morning came near to predicting that NY mayor Bloomberg will enter the race, if the Dems nominate someone “too liberal.” The same guy said that Obama’s being nominated would NOT cause Bloomberg to jump in. But someone else would. Wonder whom he could have been referring to.