I should have known better.

I know I talked big about how it was hard to get excited about the presidential primaries, what with our late-season election, but here I am, sucked into the contests playing out hundreds and thousands of miles away.

For a while, it even looked like the Indiana primary might matter, which is probably what got a lot of Hoosiers' juices flowing. That looks less likely now, but it's too late-we're suckered in.

As of this writing, before the March 4 [2008] primaries in Texas and Ohio, it looks like a 3-way contest for who's going to be the next president of the United States. That's close enough to start saying something about who people want their leader to be for the next four years.

The differences between the three candidates are striking. There's an old white guy, a young bi-racial guy, and a middle-aged WASP-y woman. As a writer, it would be difficult to come up with three better characters unless you threw a former crack addict into the mix. The eventual winner will say a lot about the country we've become, or maybe still are.

Even if John McCain didn't have the Republican nomination all but locked up, the Democratic race would still be more interesting from a social perspective. A friend who, through work, deals with people in small towns around the state was wondering aloud what some of the old-line Democrats in rural areas must think of the two Democratic candidates.

Like me, he's had enough small-town conversations to pick up on what is, in many cases, still a strong undercurrent of racism and sexism in middle America. While a person's race or gender don't matter to most of my friends (or, at least, they're too polite to say it does), voting for either a woman or a black man to be the presidential nominee must seem anathema to a lot of people.

We tried to imagine what the conversation must have been like in the room just before the Teamsters union voted to endorse Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Granted, the Teamsters have progressed with the rest of the country, but I have to think in some ways it's still the union my father belonged to, and I know what he'd be saying about the choice between a black man and a woman for president.

So far, race and gender haven't been much of an issue in this election. But as the general election campaign kicks off and gets uglier-which it will-those now-silent undercurrents will begin bubbling to the top of the American consciousness.

But enough about the differences. The three candidates in the running have some things in common, too, regardless of their political affiliation.

For one thing, they are all undeniably smart. Not "got into Yale as a legacy" smart, not "ran my dad's company" smart, but the kind of smart that comes from making some impressive accomplishments on their own.

For another thing, they all fall, more or less, in the middle section of the conservative-liberal spectrum. Many times in the past eight years, I've had conversations with people about where all the moderates have gone. Many times I've come away from discussions with both Democrats and Republicans (yes, even in Indiana) thinking that both are closer together than they are apart.

I've wondered where those "closer to the center" people have been when it comes to national politics. With this year's presidential election, it seems the moderates have found their voice.

The fact that the ultra-conservative media is squawking about how they can't support the Republican nominee might just make McCain more likely to win the general election. After all, if Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter hate him, how bad can he be?

No matter how it turns out-Republican or Democrat; Clinton, McCain or Obama-America is ready for a change in the White House that goes beyond who's sitting in the Oval Office.

God bless America.