Before he pulled out of the Democratic presidential race this week, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson was running an advert that showed him being interviewed by a bored-looking executive recruiter.
As Richardson runs down his resumé, noting his 14 years as a congressman, stints as UN ambassador and energy secretary under Bill Clinton and his experience of negotiating the release of hostages, the recruiter is unimpressed.
"So what makes you think you're qualified for this job?" he says.
That's more or less the response Iowa voters gave last week to two of the most experienced and distinguished candidates in the race, Senators Chris Dodd and Joe Biden.
Now in his sixth Senate term, Biden is chairman of the foreign relations committee and a former judiciary committee chairman. He is not only the Senate's leading expert on foreign affairs but has endured personal adversity, losing his wife and infant daughter in a car crash shortly after being elected to the senate in 1972.
From then on, he commuted 1½ hours to and from Washington every day to be with his two young sons every evening.
A senator since 1981 and a congressman for six years before that, Dodd is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. As a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s he lived in the Dominican Republic, learned Spanish and later served in the National Reserve.
None of this cut much ice in Iowa, where Dodd and Biden each received less than 1 per cent of the vote and withdrew from the race. "Whatever happened to experience?" Richardson asked plaintively during his last candidates' debate in New Hampshire.
"Is experience kind of a leper?" The surviving Democrats speak always of change, although Hillary Clinton has recently swiped a line from Republican Rudy Giuliani, making a distinction between the right kind of change and the wrong kind.
Barack Obama claims the copyright on change, grumbling at rallies that his rivals have latched on to the idea.
The most experienced Republican, John McCain, is at the head of the field but the party is so giddy that it has been thrashing around for months in search of the next big thing. First it was Giuliani with his tough-guy approach to crime and terrorism, his casual insults towards Muslims and his penchant for dressing as a woman in public.
Then it was Mitt Romney, the clean-cut former Massachusetts governor with his five handsome sons and his endless fund of innovative ideas - such as strapping the family dog to the roof of the car for an 11-hour journey.
After him came Fred Thompson, the former senator turned Law & Order star who has taken a commendably moderate approach to campaigning, scheduling a handful of events each week and remaining silent through most of the debates until this week.
For a while, it looked as if Mike Huckabee, the guitar-playing former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister, might have been the one but party bigwigs are anxious about his expressions of concern for the poor and his craven decision to allow the children of illegal immigrants to go to school.
Now, after a year of campaigning and more than $100 million in advertising, the favourites to win each nomination are the same as they were at the start - Clinton for the Democrats and McCain for the Republicans.
If there is another constant in the race, it is the teasing off-stage noises from New York where mayor Mike Bloomberg issues at least one denial a week that he is considering an independent run for the presidency. These denials are usually followed by a high-profile trip to China, an initiative on climate change or the news that the mayor has just bought the domain name mike2008.com (go on, try it).
This week's denials came as Bloomberg returned from a meeting of Democratic, Republican and independent centrists in Oklahoma that discussed the scourge of partisanship in Washington.
This week, Unity08, which has campaigned for a joint Democratic and Republican presidential ticket, suspended its activities and its founders joined a draft Bloomberg committee.