I have not decided who I am voting for yet. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I have decided on multiple occasions only to become undecided again. While some will see me as fickle, or worse, others may be in the same boat.

I am also continuing to think about what difference any of the candidates can make on the economy, and based on these musings, where to invest. My current belief is that none of them will have a profound impact on our economy.

There are no financial wizards among them. Here is the shocker though: I like all three candidates, or at least can find some good in each of them. Each of them is a fighter, and I believe each one of them brings certain skill sets to the job. There are also things about each candidate that are inescapably negative. Clinton has so much baggage, Zsa Zsa Gabor would be jealous. Obama does not have the experience and he has a degree of arrogance (right sweetie); McCain is an old stick-in-the-mud who, as a long-time senator, has spent more hours with lobbyists than almost anybody, though he is pretending otherwise.

Where does this leave me from an investment perspective? My first choice, for stability with moderate growth and dividends, remains the defense sector. I wrote Defense sector rolls over S&P 500 for 8th straight year a while back and I still think that it is the most secure. Here's why:

A) None of the candidates will want to appear soft on defense when we are at war, and all three have made threatening remarks in some country's direction to make sure the electorate knows that.

B) The War in Afghanistan and Iraq rages on, and even the most optimist view is that a draw-down will take years.

C) Even if all war ceased immediately, the upgrading and replenishment of the hardware will cost billions of dollars and most of the defense contractors have that in their backlogs now. Chasing Value: General Dynamics & Raytheon -- The defense does not rest

He made hundreds of millions of dollars running Bain Capital, but Mitt Romney won't be running the U.S. He announced this afternoon that he is ending his run for the presidency. No doubt, countless Mormons and private equity lobbyists have gone into mourning.

Technically, Romney is "suspending" his campaign. This means that he will keep the delegates he won in his primary victories in Massachusetts, Michigan and Utah. This will give him some influence in the process of selecting the eventual Republican nominee.

Although Romney was a great success in the world of private equity, it didn't seem to help him in the national campaign. Mike Huckabee's line about the essential coldness of private equity investors -- "I believe most Americans want their next president to remind them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off" -- was pretty devastating. I don't know if that background was Romney's greatest weakness -- his Mormonism didn't help, nor did his salesman's tendency to say just about anything to please a given audience -- but you can bet there are some disappointed Democrats out there. I'm sure they were looking forward to exposing the layoffs that Romney initiated through his equity investments.

From the home office in Burlington County, New Jersey. I give you the top 5 lessons learned from the presidential election so far. The results are determined through a completely arbitrary process of my own creation.

1. Super Tuesday -- The mother of all primaries produced plenty of drama -- for political junkies like me -- and not much clarity. As expected, Republican John McCain pulled ahead of rivals Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama won more states, but Hillary Clinton won some major contests including California. The big question is what happens next.
2. Money isn't everything -- Romney is discovering that buying an election isn't as easy as it looks. Chances are that he will be exiting the race within the next few weeks. It remains to be seen whether the conservatives who are throwing temper tantrums at the prospect of a McCain victory will -- as his mother suggested -- hold their nose and back the Arizona senator.
3. The debates -- Good lord, how many debates were there? A thousand? A billion? The cable networks had too many of these yack fests and allowed too many fringe candidates with little chance of winning to participate such as Duncan Hunter, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel and Alan Keyes.
4. MSNBC VS. CNN -- CNN Keeps repeating that it has "best political team" about every five minutes or so as the returns come in. It's almost as if the Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) channel is trying to convince itself that it's true. The problem is that MSNBC's coverage -- even with the highly annoying Chris Matthews --- has been better. It seems like CNN's pundits talk down to viewers while MSNBC's are a bit more down to earth. Of course, Fox News continues to attract more viewers than MSNBC, which is owned by General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE ), and CNN combined.
5. Conventional Wisdom -- The conventional wisdom espoused by the pundits has proven yet again to be spectacularly wrong. Wasn't Rudy Giuliani supposed to be the candidate to beat? Wasn't Fred Thompson going to shake up the race? Wasn't this supposed to be cakewalk for Clinton?
   

Finally, remember that presidential candidates make loads of promises that they can't possibly keep. Figuring the difference between fact and fantasy is what makes politics so interesting.

The presidential race is started to come into focus ahead of next week's Super Tuesday primaries.

Democrat John Edwards, whose anti-corporate message never resonated with most voters, is dropping out of the race after failing to win the primary in his native South Carolina, according to media reports. Rudy Giuliani, who fell from presumptive front-runner to also-ran, also is expected to bow out and endorse rival John McCain.

Odds are that Edwards will endorse rival Barack Obama, adding to the growing list of backers which include Democratic stalwart Sen. Edward Kennedy. The Illinois senator is far from having the race locked up.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson today called it quits from a presidential campaign which he undertook with all of the enthusiasm of a small child being forced to eat his peas, strengthening the surging campaign of John McCain. Meanwhile that pesky Ralph Nader is making noise about joining the campaign at this late juncture.

Thompson's departure wasn't a shock. The former actor and lawyer proved to be a surprisingly inept campaigner. In one memorable moment chronicled on YouTube, Thompson even had to ask a crowd in for a round of applause. He didn't endorse any of his former rivals.

This creates an opening that McCain can exploit. Mike Huckabee is a likable enough guy, but many people will think twice before voting for a social conservative. As for Mitt Romney, on paper he is an ideal candidate for fiscal conservatives. The trouble is that the former Massachusetts governor has made one gaffe after another, including speaking about a lifelong love of hunting that had come from the two times he actually did it.

George F. Will, a man so WASPy that he would be cast as a conservative TV pundit if he wasn't one in real life, is downright depressed about his beloved Republican party.

Writing in the Washington Post, Will said "Nov. 4 could be their most disagreeable day since Nov. 3, 1964. Actually, this November could be even worse, because in 1964 Barry Goldwater 's loss of 44 states served a purpose, the ideological reorientation and revitalization of the party. ... Today, all the usual indicators are dismal for Republicans."

Among the problems cited by the bow-tied commentator:

More people identify themselves as Democrats,

independents are sympathetic to the Democrats,

Democrats control the majority of seats in states with 303 electoral votes,

Most Americans believe the country is on the wrong track,

It sounds like a bad dream. You should up to listen to and perhaps ask questions of Mike Huckabee, a leading Republican candidate for President but first ... You have to sit through a speech about what a great opportunity Amway is. Pass the puke bucket.

But that's exactly what happened in West Des Moines, according to the Baltimore Sun: "For half an hour, two businessmen paced the stage where Huckabee would soon stump. They never said the name of the company during their talks, but afterward some members of the crowd shared with others the good news of a company called Quixtar Inc." Earlier this year, parent company Alticor said it was phasing out the Quixtar name and rebuilding its Amway brand which it had dropped in 2000.

Huckabee denies any formal association with the multi-level marketing hucksters, but said that they were a "great group of people."

It appears true that Alticor employees and executives haven't been giving to Huckabee. For whatever reason, company patriarch Richard DeVos has given money to Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. But historically, Alticor has been a huge donor to the Republican Party.

Maybe Giuliani, Romney, and the GOP as a whole should do some research into the background of the company that has been one of the part's top donors for years. They could start with this excellent Dateline special.

Add famed investor Jim Rogers to the list of people who think the economy is heading down the tubes.

In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Rogers predicted that "it's going to be one of the worst recessions we've had in a while because we had so many excesses going into it. It's going to be bad for all of us as currencies come under more and more stress and we have more inflation in the world.''

Moreover, Rogers, who already was bearish on the U.S. dollar, said he hopes to have all of his assets in other currencies by the end of the year. He also predicted that the greenback will be "under duress for many years to come."

Rogers, the head of Rogers Holdings, is hardly the only nervous Nelly about the economy. In a separate interview, with Bloomberg News, Harvard University's Martin Feldstein pegged the odds of a recession at more than 50%, adding that consumers "are going to be a little more reluctant to spend, and that is going to put a further drag on growth in 2008.''

Of course, all of this is great news for the Democrats and bad news for the Republicans, particularly former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, heading into tomorrow's New Hampshire primary. Romney has been touting his experience in corporate America to voters. But voters aren't keen on corporations these days, which is why he's losing ground to Mike Huckabee.

In describing the results of last night's Iowa caucuses, The Washington Post's David Broder minced no words: "Eight years after Iowa voters did the conventional -- sending George W. Bush and Al Gore on to meet in the election of 2000, they shook up the status quo in both parties as never before. The victories of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee jolted the expectations of establishment candidates with far stronger conventional credentials."

The New York Times' David Brooks was similarly thunderstruck. "I've been through election nights that brought a political earthquake to the country. I've never been through an election night that brought two."

While I admit the results were exciting, there is something that people often forget that the Philadelphia Inquirer's Dick Polman argues they need to remember: "Incumbents aside, exactly one victorious Iowa candidate -- George W. Bush in 2000 -- has ever gone on to win the presidency in the same year. Even though (Jimmy) Carter got an historic boost in Iowa, on the way to his November election, he actually finished second in Iowa -- behind 'Uncommitted.'"

Oh, so all of the hot air that's been expounded in the past 24 hours over this antiquated political system is that one of the least representative states in the country may not actually mean much in the long term. That's unbelievable, but what's worse is that we are about to go through this whole exercise yet again in an equally non-representative state, New Hampshire.

Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee triumphed in the Iowa caucuses last night. They won because they incited the passions of their supporters -- bringing record numbers to the 2,000 caucus locations throughout Iowa. According to the New York Times, a record number of Democrats turned out to caucus - more than 239,000 -- compared with fewer than 125,000 in 2004. By contrast, 108,000 Republicans caucused on Thursday.

Both parties had plenty about which to be passionate. Obama's supporters are a coalition of young people, women, and independents who are stirred by Obama's charisma and message of change to reject four more years of the Clintons. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, was backed by evangelical Christians who were inspired to resist Mormon Mitt Romney and his $10 million in campaign spending. Polls of Republicans entering the caucus sites found that 60% described themselves as evangelical who intended to vote for Huckabee.

How will all this passion affect Tuesday's New Hampshire primaries? Will Obama's victory in Iowa help him chip away at Hillary Clinton's formidable lead in the polls? Will Mitt Romney, who owns a home in New Hampshire, prevail over John McCain? Reuters reports on polls -- taken before the caucus results were announced -- that Clinton and McCain lead there.

Hitwise is a top-player in analyzing Internet traffic. So, why not look at the data to predict the results of the Iowa caucus?

Well, according to Hitwise, Barack Obama is the clear winner (as well as in New Hampshire). In fact, over the past month, he got 31% more Internet traffic than Hillary Clinton.

OK, what about the Republican side? The clear winner is reengage Ron Paul, who has become a darling of the internet crowd.

Also, there is another predictor to look at – that is, the market trading on the Intrade futures market (according to a piece in Reuters). The results show that Obama is going to be the winner. And, on the Republican side, it's Mike Huckabee.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.