Politics on holiday

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We have reached the moment in the 2008 presidential campaign when the candidates have come to an important conclusion about you.They think you are all idiots. And, as you may have noticed, they are beginning to treat you accordingly.With just three weeks to go before the first votes are counted in the Iowa caucuses, the candidates know that this period that is usually characterized by at least semi-intense focus on issues will be different this year. It is already blurring into a shopping-mall mesh of jingle bells and merry marketers, and campaign ads sandwiched between the canned happy talk of Christmas TV commercials.The candidates are competing against that backdrop for just a small piece of your minds. So they have switched to speaking to you in buzzwords and bumper strips. They are boiling the big issues down into a residue of snippets and sound bites. They have concluded that you won't have the time, energy or inclination to focus on anything serious they might say. So why bother?Their goal instead, in the final daze, is to surround you with impressions and imagery that may give you a good feeling down somewhere and may even give you a warm sense that they can handle the next crisis on whatever. Or solve all the old unsolved crises handed down as the legacy of the current president.The candidates already know that you are forgetting about the Iraq War. You may not think you are, but the polls know better. A CNN-WMUR poll in New Hampshire has shown that there has been a significant decline in the number of Republicans and Democrats in the state who list the war as their top concern. Among Republicans, whose candidates have no desire to bring it up in public company, 14 percent fewer listed the war as their top concern than had in June. Among Democrats, who have no solution for safely ending the unsolvable, the decline was 16 percent.There is one positive thing that can be said about what the candidates will be doing in the weeks to come: The candidates positively will be going negative. Big-time. They are desperately hoping to make you think their front-running opponent is a failure and a fraud.But here they will face a problem that will turn out to be a bit of a treat for you, much like a fleeting chance to view a rare eclipse: Because the negativity of the candidates' ads and sound bites are moving along an orbit in which, any day now, they will be aligned with the feel-warmness emanating from all of the Kris Kringles and elves and red-nosed reindeer that will be upon us at the same moment -- and, of course, the true, worshipful celebrations by those who have not forgotten the real meaning of Christmas. At this writing, it is unclear which will eclipse the other.Do not look to my colleagues in the news media to help. Unfortunately, the political news media has already launched into its horse-race mode, where it only wants to cover poll-driven news that Gallups, as they seek to be the first to predict who will win.The media is not always covering the campaign as a horse race. Sometimes they cover it as a food fight, eschewing the issues that should be thoroughly chewed over. (You note that we are talking here about the political news media. It is a breed somewhat different from the regular news media, which covers the beats where the real issues exist. But those real news journalists cannot get their reporting onto the Page One or prime-time news; so you probably will not be distracted by them.)You may have noticed, for example, that even in theoretically serious debates, serious news organizations are asking the candidates all sorts of silly and irrelevant questions. And especially among the Republicans, my colleagues have permitted serious issues such as illegal immigration to degenerate into those food fights that made you think you'd tuned in to a remake of "Animal House" in blue suits and red ties.The only question that remains unanswered: Are you really going to take it, yet again? Have you learned nothing from the last elections that gave us the mess we have today and will have to sweep up after tomorrow? While the political media is not insisting that candidates substantively address serious issues, you can. Go to a political event and tell them. Go online and blog them. Don't give tomorrow's leaders a pass.Don't allow them to treat today's crises as we have treated the war debt -- as your legacy to your grandchildren.(Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail him at martin.schram(at)gmail.com.)