Charges and countercharges are flying back and forth between the opposing camps—some substantiated, but a lot not. It makes a strong (or maybe even weak) man or woman want to go somewhere else. Or be sick.

Now and then I hear a friend say, "Why don't they get back to the issues?"

I don't know why they don't get back to the issues, but I kind of think it's precisely because no one wants to talk much about the issues that all the mud gets slung around.

It also reinforces my belief that American presidential campaigns are too long, cost too much, are mostly negative and don't do much to encourage the electorate to vote.

Both candidates have been criss-crossing the country like a couple of demented dogs trying to find a buried but forgotten bone. Fortunately for us here in the Golden State, perhaps, they both have concluded that California is a done deal—both appear to believe it is going Democratic no matter what—and so they have been expending their money, energy and time on the "battleground" states (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and the like) where the election seems to be in doubt.

This despite the fact that most polls show most members of either party long ago made up their minds about who they were going to vote for and nothing short of a national catastrophe is going to change them.

That leaves a decreasing minority of voters to slide one way or the other. There are some who believe the undecided will get so discouraged by the mudslinging that they won't vote at all.

Maybe. It won't be the first time.

Or, like us in California, or perhaps in much of the South, a lot of us will feel disenfranchised, as if we aren't really taking part in the campaign and as if our votes don't really matter.

This tends to give us an oddly separate view, as if we aren't really part of the rest of the country. (And maybe we aren't. Sometimes I'd like to think so.) For the battleground states, though, it's become a battle to the death, or at least until November, and anything seems to be fair game for discussion. Thus the former river-boat captains and the ex-National Guard officers who have come out of the woodwork or from under some rock to dish out the latest bit of dirt for the nation to digest.

It seems to me the relevance of one candidate's medals and other's required National Guard physical (or lack thereof) is certainly open to debate. All it does is keep us refighting a war that's over and done with when we ought to be worrying instead about the one in which we are presently engaged.

The candidates would have us believe, however, that it does have relevance to who should be commander in chief. On the one hand, we are asked to believe that combat decorations are a criterion for command. On the other, the commander who got us into the war in the first place wants us to think he is the commander who ought to get us out of it.

At the same time, the much-decorated veteran voted to give the president the authority to start the war he'd now like to quit. And the commander in chief doesn't seem to want to give us a hint about what he plans to do about getting us out of it. (Maybe he doesn't know.)

Health insurance, the mounting national deficit and other similar equally important issues all have been buried in the mud flying back and forth.

Well, for whatever it's worth, one way or the other it will soon all be over, and we will be free to grapple again with the really important political problems of our time. To which some, I know, will say: not a moment too soon.

I know that's true.

I also know that it is probably also too much to hope for: a political campaign that for once really dealt with the important matters before the nation.