While presiding over a 1917 United States Senate debate on the country’s needs, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, Thomas Riley Marshall, coined a witticism that captured the fancy of the American public in the days before smoking became a capital offense.

“What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar,” declared Marshall, and the line became enshrined in the country’s political lore.

Some 15 years later, during the height of the Great Depression, another wit, prominent New York journalist and radio personality Franklin P. Adams, took issue with Marshall’s position. “There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country,” Adams suggested. “The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel.”

Far as I know, the country never did produce that good five-cent cigar that Marshall advocated, although “two-fer” cigars (as in two fer a nickel) eventually became all the rage amongst connoisseurs of fine stogies for the working stiff.

And now we have a new nickel. Considering the insidious ravages of inflation and the like, it may not be the good five-cent nickel that Adams shilled for in 1932. But, whatever its worth, it’s all gussied up and shiny and it’s coming soon to a cash register near you.

The U.S. Mint announced Tuesday that millions of fresh nickels sporting their first new look in nearly seven decades are being shipped to the Federal Reserve. The new coins, which honor the Louisiana Purchase on the back but retain the image of Thomas Jefferson on the front, will be in circulation within several weeks.

Were Marshall and Adams around today to see that neither the good five-cent cigar nor the good five-cent nickel have materialized, they’d likely be disappointed, I suppose. But in light of this week’s political developments, it’s not difficult to imagine either old boy declaring from his soapbox that what this country needs even more than a decent cigar or nickel just now is a gag order on all presidential aspirants and their political campaigns until one month before the November election, fat chance though there may be of that ever happening.

Democrats on Super Tuesday in effect nominated Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts as their go-to guy in the party’s burning obsession to “take back America,” as Kerry likes to put it. That gigantic groaning sound you heard the morning after was the American public contemplating the imminent eight-month ordeal that will be this down-and-dirty political campaign of presidential politics.

It was hard enough on the paying customers when the quadrennial circus began around Labor Day. Now the ringmasters have decided it would be a swell idea to throw open the tent flap and have the barkers begin working the crowd the first week in March, practically before the first daffodil has popped through the mud? What are they – nuts? Eight solid months for the electorate to suffer the saturation of the public airwaves with insipid political advertising, a good deal of which, through distortion, half-truth and innuendo, will take targeted voters for a bunch of simpletons? Two-thirds of a year’s concentrated diet of televised charge and countercharge, doubletalk, ducking and dodging until most normal people turn blue in the face from the onslaught? Spare us the pleasure.

But sure enough: No sooner had the Bush campaign kicked off its multi-million dollar television ad campaign on Thursday than the Democrats, understandably spoiling for a good fight since those dubious days of the hanging chad in Florida, had found something to complain about.

The very first Bush ad that aired in more than a dozen battleground states, including Maine, showed images of the skeletal remains of the World Trade Center and firefighters bearing a stretcher through the rubble of 9-11.

Predictably, a firefighters union that has endorsed Kerry charged that the ad is exploitative of the tragedy, and demanded it be pulled. Republican strategists countered that the positive ad depicts the president as a strong leader in the wake of one of the most heinous attacks in the history of international terrorism and they’d have to be dumber than they might look to ignore that attack in crafting such a message.

Back and forth, to and fro, party minions labored deep into the night to talk the issue to death on the cable TV talk shows. Day One of Campaign 2004 had certainly gotten off to a fine start. And only 241 days to go before the votes are counted on Nov. 2.

If we aren’t a nation of babbling blatherskites totally at each other’s throats by then, the drinks are on me.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.