9/11 Lest we forget.

It has been a quiet couple of days in Lake Wobegon, er, Camden, which is not good because it has given Uncle Jack too much time to think about the current presidential campaign. This is the 16th one of his adult life (which he dates back to 1948 when he could legally drink beer for the first time) and he has to say it is the most depressing and disgusting one so far. He had allowed himself to think that maybe with Karl Rove on the sidelines and the "reformist" John McCain heading the ticket the Republican campaign would be at least a little more civil than it has been the last couple of times around. He was wrong, obviously, and he has to confess that the whole mess has become almost too painful to watch. Lucky for him the columnist Gail Collins of the New York Times wrote about this topic yesterday and what she had to say has cheered Uncle Jack up a little bit. Perhaps it will do the same for you---unless, of course, it makes you angry in which case you are probably a Republican.

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: September 10, 2008

It has come to our attention that a large number of Democrats have gone completely nuts about Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

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He’s going to lose! Sarah Palin is getting all the attention! The Republicans are so mean! Why isn’t he tougher?

They’re calling each other up to discuss how doomed they are, vowing to move to Canada as soon as the election is over and the inevitable worst has occurred. Really, we evacuated several hurricane-prone states with more cheer and optimism.

Cheer up, Obama-ites. You’re overreacting. I’ll answer all your questions as long as you promise to take deep breaths into this nice paper bag.

Have you seen the polls? He should be talking more about the economy! Why isn’t his campaign working harder?

If the Obama brain trust seems relatively serene compared with its seething base, it’s because they live in the Electoral College world, where the presidential race only takes place in a third of the country. They don’t care about national polls — a concept as quaint as measuring one’s wealth by caribou pelts. They worry about the undecided vote in Minnesota and Ohio and run their TV ads (about the economy) in places like Colorado and Michigan and Florida. If you live in California or New York or Texas, you don’t really have much of a feel for their level of effort because as far as they’re concerned, you’ve already voted.

I’m beginning to think we should have gone with Hillary Clinton.

Hillary now lives in a golden alternative universe. As soon as the Democrats had actually nominated Obama, they decided that Clinton was by far the better candidate and that they had destroyed their chances by not choosing her. This is the nature of the party. If she had not been in the race, the Democrats would probably be bemoaning the fact that they hadn’t stuck with John Edwards and nailed down the critical swing-state philanderer vote.

Obama seems to be disappearing from the news compared with Sarah Palin!

One of the great things about this campaign is that both sides are convinced they’re going to lose. Remember how nuts all the Obama people went when Hillary refused to concede? How suicidal the Republicans were when Obama was knocking them dead in Europe while McCain was tooling around in a golf cart with the president’s father? We still have nearly two months to go. The people who haven’t decided who they want to vote for by now aren’t going to make up their minds until the last minute. Just chill for a few weeks until the debates start and let the Sarah Palin thing play itself out.

But the vice president isn’t supposed to get any attention, and all people can talk about is Palin, Palin, Palin!

True. I think that’s because she’s from Alaska. It’s got that frontier aura that we’ve missed since all the cowboy television series were canceled a generation ago. Plus, it gives us the opportunity to talk a lot about moose, which are a funny animal no matter how you slice it. If Palin had been a deer-hunting mom from New Jersey, John McCain would have gotten no post-convention bump whatsoever.

McCain, by the way, is the Republican nominee for president. You may remember him from the Sarah Palin convention in Minneapolis, where he gave a speech and was congratulated by Sarah Palin.

Have you seen that Republican lipstick video? They’re trying to say Obama called her a pig!

Obama simply brought up the old saw about how “you can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” The Republicans seem to be assuming that since Palin has a joke about how hockey moms are pit bulls with lipstick, all references to mammals wearing lip rouge are about her.

If you really want to see a strange line of attack, take a look at the wolf ad. It cuts from Palin’s face to Obama’s to packs of wolves prowling through the forest, presumably in search of vice-presidential prey. Then comes the text claiming that as Barack drops in the polls, “he’ll try to destroy her.” Given Palin’s affection for shooting wolves from airplanes with high-powered rifles, it’d be more appropriate to have them cowering in their dens while she aims her machine gun from a diving Cessna.

You don’t seem to appreciate how critical this election is.

Well, I definitely appreciate how long this election is. Time only seems short because these people have already been running for a year. Calm down. Remember, that 17-mile-long Swiss particle collider that people were afraid would create a black hole that swallows the Earth? It started operation this week. And so far, no planet-eating black holes. So you see, things could be worse.