1. Hillary Clinton kicks off 2016 campaign with online video, heads to Iowa

Much about the current primary system makes sense — a single-day, nationwide primary would force candidates to ignore all but the big cities in the swing states — but parts of it don’t. For example, why does Iowa get such a big say in who eventually becomes president of the United States?

Iowans will be the first to cast ballots, sometime in early January of next year. Even before the Iowa caucus, there will be straw polls there.

Just for suggesting that Iowa shouldn’t have a disproportionate influence on primaries last month, GOP strategist Liz Mair was fired from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign.

“The sooner we remove Iowa’s frontrunning status, the better off American politics and policy will be,” Mair tweeted.

Iowa party officials were furious.

“It’s obvious she doesn’t have a clue what Iowa’s all about,” said Iowa’s Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann. “I find her to be shallow and ignorant,” he added, “and I’ll tell you, if I was Governor Walker, I’d send her her walking papers.”

Walker did, but Mair had a point. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2012, “Who died and made Iowans pope?”

“It’s worth recalling that there’s no actual reason why Iowa should go first,” Goldberg pointed out in a USA Today column. “All the explanations you hear from Iowa party hacks and their enablers are post-hoc rationalizations for why Iowa should stay first. The caucuses were moved to the front of the schedule essentially by accident in 1972. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, a dark horse candidate, committed himself to campaigning aggressively in what was still considered a political backwater and emerged a star.”

That’s when the political media “romanticized the place and started treating Iowa as special.”

Even aside from the fact that Iowa’s influence is disproportionate and unfair, there’s a good reason to kick Iowa out of the first-place spot: ethanol.

Candidates who want to do well in Iowa have to pay tribute to the alternative fuel that is one of the government’s biggest, most wasteful boondoggles.

“Without the Iowa caucuses we would never have wasted billions of dollars on environmentally damaging and economically wasteful ethanol subsidies,” Goldberg points out. “It’s nice that Iowa is the Saudi Arabia of corn, but there’s no reason for presidential aspirants to kowtow to Big Corn’s interests every four years. Even worse, every politician who even fantasizes about sitting in the Oval Office pays obeisance to the preservation of government moonshine.”

Finally, Iowans are terrible at predicting who the eventual nominee will be. In 2008, the GOP winner was Mike Huckabee, whose candidacy went nowhere; in 2012, it was Rick Santorum, whose run also ended with a whimper.

There are some easy fixes.

“Why not rotate the first in the nation status every four years?” he asks. “Or we could declare that whichever state had the closest results in the previous general election could go first the next time around, guaranteeing swing states get first crack.”

Whatever the solution, the problem is clear.

Iowa has too big a say in who our next president will be.