Can I Just Say

That I don't care how much Sarah Palin's wardrobe costs any more than I care about whether Joe Biden had botox, which is next to nothing.

I do wonder how much money on clothes and plastic surgery many of the people bloviating on network news programs about it have spent.

However, I do think that more forthright responses from campaigns would pour water on stories like this before they ever really caught fire.

Network news blowhard: "Did the RNC spend $150,000 on Gov. Palin's chothes?"

McCain/Palin Spokesmodel: "Yes we did. And it was worth every penny. She looks marvelous. Next?"

Then we could get on with the discussion of whether Alaska really does afford a view of Russia and whether that constitutes foreign policy experience. And whether Sen. Biden has learned to plagiarize speeches from people who can win elections.

(Google "joe biden neil kinnock" if you don't know to what I refer.)

If the media want to know why people are tuning them out, it's because their treatment of the presidential election as a sporting event and their fixation on things that don't really matter leaves them out of touch with what people care about.

Even the term "presidential race," with polls giving us the current standings, is inaccurate. It's not a football game. The "score" the polls tell us on a given day doesn't matter. It's cheap and easy television to produce that fills time but it doesn't shed light on either candidate or his fitness for office.

How much discussion -- other than one candidate criticizing another and the news reporting of such -- do you hear about health care, the war and the economy and what either one of these guys, if elected, could do about it?