If you turn on CNN, open up The New York Times or just walk down State Street, you can be sure to be bombarded with news and opinions about the war in Iraq.

For the last few years our nation and our government have been wrapped up in Middle East policy and how to deal with the situation back home. In this polarizing time of conflict, we have almost completely overlooked countless other issues that must be addressed in our country.

It can be argued that Sept. 11 and the continuing war on terror are the most formative events of our relatively young lives, but there are so many other things that are happening near and far. Many of us seem to be ignoring the plethora of issues due to our intense fits of support or dissent toward the Iraq conflict. What ever happened to education? Health care? Poverty? Immigration?

Without question, the war is linked to all of these issues due to its direct effect on the national budget, yet we do not need to let it completely push these other pertinent issues out of our heads.

So, why do we need to flip to C-SPAN instead of ESPN? How about that presidential election coming around the corner in 2008? There will be a brand new leader of the free world, and we should not elect him, or her, based solely on his or her position on Iraq.

What we do know is that most candidates will try to distance themselves from President Bush and his exact policies on the war. It is looking more and more like even leading Republican candidates such as Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson will need to take a different stance on the war from the president. In the most recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, 33 percent of respondents approved of Mr. Bush's management of the "situation in Iraq"; 65 percent did not.

If Republicans or Democrats want to win they're going to have to show that they can help Americans with needs that have not been satisfied during this eight-year administration, such as a real solution to illegal immigration, health care for the uninsured , a balanced national budget, and the list goes on.

We college students must keep our heads on straight when we head to the polls in just over a year and vote based on more than one issue. We need to think about the 12 million illegal immigrants in our country, the 47 million Americans without health insurance, and the skyrocketing costs of college tuition across the nation.

The news is flooded with so many reports from Iraq, expert opinions on Iraq, political debates on Iraq and protests on Iraq that it may seem almost impossible to avoid letting it take over your political thought process.

More than 3,000 of our brave soldiers have died in combat in the "war on terror," yet at home, studies reported by the National Coalition on Health Care estimate that "the number of excess deaths among uninsured adults age 25-64 is in the range of 18,000 a year."

Similarly, murders took nearly as many lives in the United States as the lack of health care, an estimated 17,034 people in 2006, according to the FBI. Who can we elect to lower this overwhelming number — which is strongly linked to poverty and education, or lack thereof, among other things?

Thousands of Iraqis have been left homeless because of violence in the region. Think, however, about the approximately 3.5 million U.S. citizens, including 1.35 million children and nearly 5,000 here in Madison, who don't have a place to call home. What can we do to help them in elections to come?

We obviously have big problems back home. I'm not telling you who to vote for in ’08. I am just asking you to let other issues affect you as well.

Henry Weiner ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science.