I think everybody should move to New Hampshire.  At least until January.

That’s because while many Americans couldn’t spot the Granite State on a map if you narrowed it down to New England (and I know no reader of this column would ever have that problem, but in case you should sustain a cranial trauma or you’re Jason Bourne, that’s Vermont on the left, fat on top, next to upstate New York, while New Hampshire’s on the right, fat on bottom, next to Maine), candidates for President are drawn here like the Millennium Falcon to the Death Star.

Which is how I came to be hanging out with John Edwards a few weeks ago in some dude’s backyard.

Well, “hanging out with” is perhaps inaccurate; it implies that we shared a beer, if not a bag of Doritos, and that’s not the case.  But I was poolside, at an invitation-only John Edwards “house party,” chatting with fellow registered voters and waiting for the candidate to arrive.

Now, I have been to political events before, and seen politicians do their politician thing, waving to the crowd, smiling, shaking hands, kissing babies, and so forth.

But I have never seen one make his entrance while eating a cookie.  Edwards played it off as though he were just enjoying the baked goods when suddenly the host asked him to say a few words, but the gesture was undoubtedly scripted to portray an accessible folksiness and pre-emptively thwart any lurking barbs about a $400 haircut.  (Interesting tidbit:  if you Google “$400 haircut” – no “John Edwards” necessary – you’ll get back more than 181,000 results.  Good luck finding one that isn’t about Edwards.)

Of course, you don’t need the albatross of a $400 haircut to go folksy in New Hampshire.

From Moultonborough to Wolfeboro, from New Durham to New Ipswich, from Derry to Londonderry and from Fitzwilliam to Freedom, presidential candidates are rolling up their sleeves and getting in touch with real people: sipping coffee with veterans, reading books to schoolchildren, lunching with voters at the local diner, and meeting and greeting everyone they can at house parties, town hall gatherings, and rallies.

In other words, this place is lousy with politicians.  In the last two days alone, we’ve had Dennis Kucinich (meeting with union workers in Portsmouth and discussing energy issues in Dover yesterday), Rudy Giuliani (hosting a town hall meeting in Derry, and stopping in Pelham, Hudson, and Nashua on Thursday, and hosting a town hall meeting in Merrimack, followed by stops in Manchester, Peterborough, Milford, and Amherst on Friday), Mitt Romney (holding a public forum in Londonderry on Thursday), Ron Paul (“unspecified campaign stops” across the state, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader), Duncan Hunter (law firm forum in Manchester today), and Mike Huckabee (spaghetti dinner in Manchester tonight) all traipsing about the state.

We’re lavished with all this attention, of course, because New Hampshire hosts the first primary (though not the first caucus; that’s Iowa’s thing, and don’t ask me the difference between a caucus and a primary, because I don’t care).

And while I’m certainly welcome to the idea of being wooed, I’m not entirely sure we deserve it.  Maybe I just haven’t lived here long enough, but I have a hard time seeing New Hampshire as a representative state.  We’re the only state in the union with no adult seat-belt law, we’re one of only five states with no sales tax (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, and Oregon are the others – real mainstream company there), the prevailing political doctrine seems to be radical libertarianism, and as of 2005, our population is 96 percent white.

As best I can tell, the only thing that qualifies us for this special status is that we can’t make up our minds.  According to a recent University of New Hampshire poll for CNN and WMUR-TV, 64 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans still haven’t decided who they’re going to vote for.

But whether this wooing is warranted or not, the candidates will keep on coming, and I plan to take full advantage of it.  Because come January, after that first primary has passed and the fundamentally-flawed political machine that is the United States Electoral College kicks into effect, candidates for president will turn their attention to states that matter, like Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, and they’ll no longer care what New Hampshire residents and their piddling four electoral votes have to say.

Which is why you should move to New Hampshire for a few months and have your voice heard too, while you still can.

And not that I need to make the invitation more enticing, but we just painted the guest room, so you can stay with us.

Well, as long as you don’t mind sharing a bed with Kucinich.