DALE MCFEATTERS Never-ending presidential campaign

As raucous and boisterous as American politics has always been, the actual election of the president was once a sedate affair.
Candidates for president didn't so much campaign for the job as lobby for it.
The actual choice of candidates was done in party conventions presided over by party bosses. Sometimes the selection was brisk; sometimes it involved breaking a deadlock through the effective if unhealthful artifice of the "smoke-filled room." After the conventions, the public was told who their candidates would be.
By tradition, the campaign itself began on the first weekend in September, later solemnized as Labor Day, and proceeded at the leisurely pace of a horse -- and later a locomotive -- until Election Day.
The public actively participated in the campaigns, with torch-lighted parades, booming brass bands and rallies -- often enhanced by a liberal dispensing of whiskey, a tradition that sadly seems to have been lost.
Beginning in the '20s, radio and the railroads made the candidates accessible. Now, in the 21st century, charter jets and cable TV have made the candidates inescapable.
Once the power brokers chose who in their parties should run for president, based on the twin criteria of pliability and electability. Now candidates are self-selected. Who knows what voices -- audible only to them -- summoned Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun to run?
Early anointments
And if many are called, those who are chosen are picked by a relative handful of people in a relative handful of states -- Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. With those early anointments, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts had the Democratic nomination effectively wrapped up on Super Tuesday, March 2. The voice of New Jersey will be heard June 8.
He is not the official nominee yet, but anyone confident enough to knock off for a week of R-and-R in Sun Valley, Idaho, should be rehearsing his acceptance speech and teasing prospective running mates.
The nominations of Kerry and George W. Bush become official this summer at the parties' conventions, increasingly ceremonial affairs since the 1950s that now have become insipid four-day infomercials for the candidates.
That accomplished, the formal campaign is set to begin. We should be so lucky.
The campaign is already under way between two candidates, neither of whom speaks like a normal person. President Bush, who denied he was in "campaign mode" even as he campaigned furiously, now says he really is in campaign mode.
Kerry is jubilantly appearing with former Presidents Carter and Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Apparently, we need to be reminded that two of those lost presidential campaigns and the third was impeached.
Scripps Howard News Service