I’m not happy about it, but this column is going to be about the presidential election.

It’s too early. The election is more than a year away, for Pete’s sake, and the people who are running for president, at least most of them, already hold offices. They should be doing the job they were elected to last time. They could wait another six months and still have plenty of time to deliver their glittering visions of how great they would be at running the country.

Reality, however, simply refuses to adopt my fantasy, and, since candidates are already out there spreading their — uh — messages, I might as well go ahead and write about them. Today’s subjects are Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.

Sen. Cruz opposes the Common Core Standards many states, including Wyoming, have adopted for their schools, and he believes they should be repealed.

That’s an interesting position, because that tells me he doesn’t actually understand the Common Core. He appears to believe it is a federal curriculum being forced on the states, and since he’s calling for it to be repealed, he must believe that it has passed into law by Congress, because if it hasn’t, there’s nothing to repeal.

Fact is, school officials in the states created the standards, and although the Obama administration encouraged states to adopt them, it wasn’t a mandate. Nor was the Common Core a curriculum, but a set of standards that students should meet. All public schools have standards, whether they are created by the state departments of education or school districts themselves, and from my experience, I think they are all pretty similar. Private schools have them, too, and I’d bet they look a lot like the public school models, because people generally want kids to learn the same stuff in school. The Common Core only attempted to standardize the standards, so to speak. If it was eliminated, schools would likely adopt similar sets of standards. They could even just change the name of  the Common Core to, say, Elephant Toes School District No. 493 Standards and use them anyway.

I do wonder how the senator plans to end the Common Core since Congress can’t repeal them. Will he punish schools using them somehow? That wouldn’t work for a President Cruz, who would already have ended federal aid to schools.

I don’t think he would send the FBI to arrest the Wyoming State Legislators who voted to adopt the standards, or order any school superintendents using the standards into relocation camps, but he’d have to find some way to force schools to drop them. Forcing states or schools to drop the standards would violate the rights of states, and as a conservative, Sen. Cruz would object to that; but maybe President Cruz would let power go to his head and do it anyway.

In short, the senator is promising to do something he really hasn’t the power to do. If he invented the power, it would violate his conservative principles, and after he had done it, nothing would really change. That makes me think he really hasn’t thought the issue through. I don’t think he’d be a good president.

Ben Carson’s position is, “I’m not a politician. I don’t want to be a politician. Politicians do what is politically expedient. I want to do what’s right.”

A politician can always draw a crowd by claiming not to be one, but it makes no sense. It’s like saying you want to be my dentist, but you don’t plan to look at any teeth. It’s also an untrue statement, because the very fact that he is running for president makes him a politician.

Of course Carson wants to do what’s right, but as president, unless he decides to be a dictator, he will have to build support for what he wants to do, and that means working with people who think they are right and you are wrong, or even that you are right but they are more right.

Bringing people around to support what you think is right requires the skills of a politician, and without those skills, Carson will not be successful. Successful presidents, like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, have been good politicians.

Jimmy Carter, by contrast, was a man of great faith and strong principles, much like Dr. Carson, but he wasn’t a good politician and isn’t remembered as a great president.

Consider also two governors, Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said they weren’t politicians. Both of them left office in frustration after one term, having accomplished little of importance.

If Dr. Carson were elected president, he would be a politician whether he liked it or not, and would have to do the things all presidents have done, including acting out of political expediency, which some people would call compromise.

Personally, I believe every American citizen is, or should be, a politician. We are the government, and anyone who participates in public life, even if it’s just by writing a letter to your city councilman, is helping run that government.

That’s why I write this column. I am a politician, and I’m proud to be one.