Oh, great. Dueling automated negative “robo- calls.” Just what this never-ending Presidential Campaign From Hell needs, was my first thought as I answered the phone one otherwise fine day earlier this week. My second thought was that if someone would please just shoot me I should be much obliged.

The caller, a robot on speed-dial from the Barack Obama campaign, was calling to denounce the robot on speed-dial that had called me from the John McCain campaign a few days previous.

The McCain robot had phoned to remind me that Obama was a pal of William Ayers, former radical Weather Underground bomber turned radical college professor. The automaton had suggested that I’d therefore be a dope to vote for Obama in the Nov. 4 election.

The Obama robot was allegedly so turned off by the McCain robot’s call that it had changed its mind about voting for McCain. It would vote for Obama instead, and the implication was that if I possessed an ounce of common decency I would as well.

The dueling robo-calls served to emphasize two things, the first being that this two-year presidential campaign has regressed from the sublime to the ridiculous. One campaign floods the countryside with negative automated phone calls. The other campaign calls the practice reprehensible, morally despicable, abhorrent and mean. Then it floods the countryside with negative automated phone calls. Although I can’t quite put my double-standard finger on it, I sense that something is wrong with this picture.

The second thing the dustup shows is that neither campaign appears to have much regard for the intelligence of an electorate that will put one of the candidates in charge of running things come next January. It’s difficult to imagine that anyone could be swayed to vote a particular way on the basis of a rabidly partisan robo-call, especially if it comes just as the potential voter is sitting down to supper. But it’s not so hard to imagine that such calls might prod some disgusted recipients to consider either voting for None Of The Above or not voting at all.

Not that it seems to matter much at this point. That gawd-awful bellowing you hear emanating from the left wing of the stage is the fat lady warming up in anticipation of her final aria and curtain call. Her tune is confidence personified: If Democrats can’t win this election, they can’t win anything.

Let us count the ways the deck is stacked in their favor: Eight years of rule by a Republican president whose approval rating is under 30 percent. An economy headed south in recession. A giant federal bailout of the financial sector with your tax dollars. Two wars that, like this election campaign, appear to have gone on forever. A seemingly near-limitless supply of money that allows the privately funded Obama campaign to spend at four times the rate of the publicly financed McCain campaign.

It would take a doozy of a late October surprise to turn things around for Republicans, a perfect storm of ill luck for Democrats – self-inflicted or otherwise – for the Obama campaign to screw up the free lunch that fate has laid out for it.

In the meantime, a weary electorate has heard the candidates’ arguments so many times we can recite the talking points nearly as well as the candidates themselves. Maybe even better.

Perhaps that’s because, there being nothing new under the sun, mankind has heard it all before, many times over. An e-mail blurb from a downstate chum quotes Roman statesman and orator Cicero telling his constituents in 55 B.C., “The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance …”

So much for that allegedly innovative “change” thing that our presidential candidates have flogged to within an inch of its life. Let us hope that the coming change works out better for us than it did for the Roman Empire.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.