he knowledge that we face 51 weeks of hard journalistic slogging between today and the glorious night when the Republicans crown their presidential nominee can take the edge off even the finest end-of-summer weather.
A whole year less a week? Can we stand it? Can George W. Bush stand it? We already detect the predictable backlash against the Hey-George-did-things-really-go-better-with-coke? business. I can see this demonizing business spiraling out of control.
From the weathered parapets of The New York Times editorial page, which has exhibited for years a fascinating preoccupation with the home life of Clinton & Clinton, comes this stern balancing-the-partisan-scales scolding:
''Mr. Bush cannot have it both ways on his personal life. He voluntarily proclaimed his marital fidelity, which is surely the most private of subjects. That only adds to the impression that he is hiding something about other aspects of his life.''
What if readers start demanding to know if pundits were drug-soaked post-adolescents? (Candor compels me to affirm a relationship with Demon Rum, though my only Coke is diet, to address the two drugs at issue in the Bush bramble.)
George W.'s breastbeating about how golly-gee faithful he's been to his wife has been going on for some months now. I thought it was a mistake then, and now it has boomeranged around to bonk him on the back of the noggin. It's the mistake most rookies make when they get to the big leagues. You try to swerve people by talking about one thing, but that leads you into an area you don't want to discuss.
Rule No. 1: Never give your enemies a club with which to beat you. And George W. has handed over a Louisville slugger.
Bush's initial mistake was to start yakking about his personal morality, in stark contrast to You-know-who's, as a substitute for not talking about substantive issues. George W. crapped out big time on Kosovo, waffling, weaving, dodging, and ducking, never taking a position on a life-and-death national issue till the matter was decided. He thought he could coast along on his pot of campaign gold and his party's lust for a nonloser this time.
''I don't run polls to tell me what to think,'' he harrumped before the Ames, Iowa, straw poll crowd, which he captured handily with 31 percent of the vote of those attending. That turned out to be the most important day of the year for Bush and others, knocking Lamar Alexander out of the race, neutering Dan Quayle, salting fool's gold in the ore being mined by Steve Forbes (second place), and setting up the absent Senator John McCain as the middle-of-the-road Republican's alternative to Bush in New Hampshire.
Maybe Bush should run some polls to tell him what to think. His program to date is a bunch of mostly blank pages. He's for the death penalty, for citizens having the right to carry concealed handguns, and against taxes. And he calls Greeks ''Grecians.'' Did I leave anything out?
But vapidity on a vast scale did not prevent him from delivering a clever speech at Ames. Why clever when it was so empty? Because it was in the style of an inaugural speech. That's it, I exclaimed: George W. is skipping the caucuses, the primaries, the convention, the acceptance speech, the fall campaign that won't even begin till a year from now, and he's going right to the inaugural - that won't be officially delivered for another 18 months!
When George W. pursed his little lips and narrowed his eyelids and squinted his best Texas Ranger squint and vowed to uphold the dignity of this high office, ''so help me God!'' and ended his pitch with a heartfelt ''God Bless America!'' I thought: ''Gee, what if he really thinks this is all just a formality and he's already picking out the drapes for the Oval Office?''
Bush's victory in Ames brought him back onstage for a victory lap. He was expansive in triumph. There was the down-home modesty politicians like to put on for the rubes. ''Today we shattered every record for the Ames straw poll ... we met our expectations, and we won this straw poll the Iowa way - neighbor to neighbor.'' Since Bush made only three visits to Iowa and Lamar Alexander was there 80 times but finished sixth, one might conclude that familiarty breeds contempt. Bush winked that ''some pundits said I had everything to lose,'' but he fixed them city-slicker varmints now, didn't he?
With his slightly crooked grin, his uncertain platform manner, and a tendency to repeat his phrases out of nervousness or uncertainty that's he has not been heard in a cavernous hall, Bush is not yet any kind of Clintonesque juggernaut at the microphone. But he was the class of the field that day.
Party conclaves reinforce myths, the way the Russians used to claim they invented the telephone. In the Ames cattle call, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah tried to cop a little limelight share with Ronald Reagan. To conservatives, it was their Hollywood-honed Ronnie who described America's aspiration: ''As President Reagan said, `Keep America as a shining city on a hill.'''
As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Hatch should know a copyright violation when he utters one. Some Democrats might think that line belongs to JFK, who used it to telling effect in the early '60s. Alas, the pol who originated that phrase was John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, at a time when, if we had one man, one vote, the Indians would have been running everything.
But look where we are today: a chicken in every pot, a desktop in every den, and a sixgun in every waistband or purse. Be careful with that pea-shooter, podnah; if we catch ya, we'll hang ya. See ya.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
