Last Thursday, I had the honor and the privilege of contributing my very expensive and valuable time to a greater cause than those that usually occupy my spare moments. I drove down to Wilmington, Del., to stay by the University of Delaware, and stopped in to check out the headquarters of the Joe Biden presidential campaign. A very nice political staff assistant by the name of Josh Kagan was gracious enough to give me a tour of the operation and even put me to work despite failing to deliver on his promise for a ‘Biden for President’ T-shirt.

The campaign office was nothing like what I had expected. I’d been brainwashed by Hollywood, specifically by ‘The West Wing,’ into believing any campaign office had hundreds of phones, computers, employees and mountains of polling data. What I found in Joe Biden’s office was more of a grassroots effort, the kind of campaign that every candidate should have to run, being run out of a storefront office in an industrial Wilmington neighborhood.

All over the cubicle walls of the office are maps of Iowa, South Carolina and other early primary states, littered with Post-it notes detailing where the senator or his staff have spoken, or are scheduled to speak. It would seem that the Biden campaign is trying its best to take its message door to door, as opposed to the opponents’ mass media tactics. The strategy doesn’t appear to be paying off ‘ at least not yet.

Despite his obvious qualifications for the office of the president, Sen. Biden has been unable to match the fundraising firestorm that has swept up the political process of late. Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are in funding leagues of their own while candidates like Biden and Governor Bill Richardson seemingly wallow somewhere between vice presidential candidacy and insignificance due to an inability to compete financially.

But there is reason to be upbeat for Democrats not satisfied with a choice between the senator from New York and her counterpart from Illinois. Half of this country hates Hilary Clinton and a whole bunch more don’t think Obama is qualified to serve in the office. The race is still wide open and the employees in Biden’s office maintain a positive attitude.

To that effect, I asked Mr. Kagan why the senator was still hanging around despite the obvious mountain that still needed to be climbed. He responded that ‘we believe in the senator and he believes he can win.’

Campaign staffers are busy finding delegates to go speak in communities all across the country on behalf of Biden. They spend all day on the phones and answering e-mail, trying to assemble an army of volunteers to help bridge the gap between him and the party front-runners. Several of the staffers are in their 20s and more than a few are recent college graduates.

What I came away thinking after spending half an hour with some of the other staffers, photocopying and organizing campaign donation checks, was that political campaigning needs a drastic overhaul. Everyone should have to compete on the same playing field, out of storefronts in local neighborhoods with cubicles and lots of young, underpaid and ambitious staffers. There should be a spending limit that each candidate is allotted and no one should be able to spend more than the next on expensive mass media campaigning methods. There should be more money spent on creating open dialogue and debates, and less into stump speeches and photo opportunities. There should be town hall meetings instead of fundraisers at fancy hotels.

And there should be more contact between candidates and citizens without the media monster getting in the way, distorting messages and creating conflicts between candidates instead of dialogue among Americans.