The virtual, and virtually invisible, campaign.

We have only one network-affiliated (ABC) television station in New Hampshire. Our local cable systems bring us all the Boston stations, and a few from Maine, and of course the entire cluster of cable news stations, but if we want to see television news of, by, and for New Hampshire, the choice is WMUR, or WMUR (or WNDS, a local independent station with a low-budget news operation). We might say, then, that WMUR lives off the drug of campaign advertising. It gets an injection of primary election dollars that fattens its revenue column for the next four years.

I confess I do not watch the local television news every day. Some nights it's dinner time, and other nights I'm in bed before the 11:00 PM broadcast. Still, when the ads are flying, it's pretty difficult not to see all the ads more times than you want. (I recall when one of my children was 4, in a space of a few weeks he had memorized the entire text of Pat Buchanan's now fondly-remembered anti-Bush ad: "Read My Lips, No New Taxes"). However, recently, even with some effort on my part to search for television ads (I have to have something to write about here), I sometimes feel like I fell asleep and missed the primary. Have the candidates gone on to Michigan or South Carolina? Recently, I've seen a John Edwards ad on the issue of health care, but not much else -- at least on television.

There aren't any radio ads either, and that is unusual for New Hampshire. I've always heard primary radio ads in the past, but can't recall a single one I've heard yet in this season. Earlier in the Fall and late Summer, we were getting at least a piece of direct mail a week, and had by the end of September been mailed by Kerry, Dean, Gephardt, Lieberman, and Edwards. But, there's been nothing in a couple of weeks, and I don't think I signed up on the "do not mail" list. Does this spell a shift in the political advertising paradigm?

We have local elections coming up in New Hampshire in a couple of weeks, and perhaps the presidentials are leaving the field to the mayoral and school board candidates. Perhaps the candidates for the land's highest office don't want to be confused with those neighbors of mine who are running for city council. "Do you know about the candidacy of Wesley Clark?" "Oh, sure, isn't he running for ward three school district representative?"

What I have been getting a lot of are campaign emails. This is the cheap and efficient way to annoy lots of voters at the same time. I'm not sure how the candidates have gotten my email, and I really don't mind deleting their almost weekly "campaign updates" and "important election announcements" but I have to wonder which campaign strategist thought it was a good idea to have his candidate's message captured by my spam filter, and sandwiched between ads for cheap off-shore pharmaceuticals and messages encouraging me to augment my manhood.