Want to have some fun? Try explaining to a foreigner how Americans select their presidential candidates.

Can't find a foreigner? Try explaining it to an American.

In college, I knew a young man from Europe who had aspirations of becoming a journalist here. He changed his major after a few weeks, explaining that he just couldn't understand our system of government. I tried telling him that most of us didn't get it, either, but it was no use.

At least with government, the system is designed with an emphasis on fairness rather than efficiency. An all-powerful dictator could get things done with great efficiency. Instead, in a couple of weeks Utahns will get another yearly reminder, via the annual session of the state Legislature, that representative democracies are messy, a bit nutty, but ultimately fairly slow-moving and steady.

Presidential elections, however, are just messy. Period. People often warn against watching two things, the making of laws and the making of sausages, as both can ruin your appetite for what generally passes as a nice result. Watching political parties choose candidates, however, is more like watching someone going nuts with a Samurai sword in a slaughterhouse.

With Iowa's nonbinding caucus in the rearview mirror and New Hampshire's binding primary coming up — like two nearby small towns on a rural highway — a lot of people have been asking me why those two states get so much attention. The answer is long and complicated and ultimately of little help. A better question would be to ask you to come up with a better system.

Before starting, however, you must remember two things. The first is that the political parties are responsible for governing the process that chooses their candidates. Some state laws complicate the process. New Hampshire, for instance, has a law that requires the state to hold its primary on a Tuesday at least seven days before any other state does so. But the parties can attempt to control things by stripping states of delegates if they step too far out of line.

The second thing to remember is that there is no such thing as a federal election. Elections are state matters. In other words, you can propose that Congress pass laws imposing one system or another, but that probably would be unconstitutional.

There is a third thing — no system known to man would give Utah any real clout in the selection process, unless you could change the name of the state to Iowa or New Hampshire.

And I suppose I could add a fourth thing, as well. The old way of selecting candidates, in which influential and often corrupt political bosses orchestrated things with secret backroom back-room deals, was worse than anything we have today.