Agence-Vleeptron Presse's guide of what's left of Campaign 2008 to those overseas and overtrees

Ah, sure, click, this may be your last chance.

A pen pal from South Africa was incautious enough to ask for local Man-on-the-Ground details about the USA presidential election campaign.

Above, what's left of the candidate field. Agence-Vleeptron Presse's original fancy campaign logo now admits that we took the Hair and Teeth from John Edwards, and the hearty manly handshake from a website that teaches business skills, apparently to business wannabes who didn't know how to stick out their hand and shake.

For the hair and teeth, it was a close race between Edwards and Mitt Romney, but we just have to say here and now that John Edwards had better hair and teeth than Romney. Each of them spends more on his hair than I do to keep my truck on the road, including insurance. And see where it got them. Hair and teeth are highly overrated.

Kucinich, probably the most unattractive troll in the entire field of candidates, has been brutally punished for daring to thrust his unattractiveness in America's eyeballs for so long on so many hi-def television screens. To see how badly he's been punished, click here. On the NPR weekend quiz show "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," some wag said Kucinich was probably the first politician in history who was pefectly sincere when he said he was dropping out of the race to spend more time with his family.

On Monday night, David Letterman said New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was probably going to resign "so he can spend less time with his family."

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Even at our best and most high-minded, America is an overwhelmingly Protestant country, and it was considered an article of faith that no Catholic could ever be elected President, so Kennedy's election was a great maturing moment for this traditionally virulently anti-Papist country.

Now we face the fascinating landmark of an African-American or a woman president. It looks as though either will walk over the Republican nominee McCain; for the twin issues of Republican corruption and Bush's ghastly Iraq War, which McCain loudly threatens to redouble and wage for decades, the Democrats haven't had such a promise of victory in decades.

Yesterday Bush and McCain posed in front of the White House and Bush endorsed McCain. The gesture was inevitable, but is somewhat like an endorsement from Bozo the Clown or from a notorious serial killer. Since presidential popularity polls began, no one has swirled around the bottom of the commode numerically like Bush.

I've tried to keep this little scenario fairly untainted by my heavily Lefty anti-war sentiments, but it's authentically true that most American voters desperately want a big change and hope either Clinton or Obama will provide it. The recession and mortgage/housing collapse we've just slid into isn't helping the Republicans' prospects in November.

Just to rub in the trivial aspects of what will happen in the voting booths, McCain is quite old -- I think I read that were he to win, he would be the oldest president ever to take office -- and of all our voting prejudices, old age is one of the worst. Voters want change and just don't see it likely coming from grampa the war hero.

This now brings us to Hillary vs. Obama. Well -- as long as politicians rarely ever DO anything of positive significance, I've always believed they're at least obligated to entertain us, and the fight for the Democratic nomination promises to be the most entertaining authentically nasty mud-wrestle bout in decades.

To go on, it would be impossible to keep my prejudices out of it. I liked Bill, and (somewhat against his own political instincts) he actually did some things I admire. (You know I'm an Army vet, and he cut his losses in the Somalia disaster and pulled the troops out -- an almost impossible and unprecedented political move.) And in general, Americans all over the spectrum genuinely like and even love the somewhat tom-catty fellow with the inappropriate twinkle in his eye. Likeability is a magical gift, and Bill authentically has it.

Hillary is a very different story, or at least my perception and the public's perception of her. She's perceived as angry, combative, a bit paranoid, often vindictive and petty, and unlike Bill, has demonstrated really bad political instincts. Obama has made most of his surprising gains simply by appearing likeable and psychologically normal -- a guy you wouldn't mind spending time chatting or socializing with.

Neither, to be brutally honest, has a lick of real governing or foreign-policy or military experience. So it's a Beauty Contest.

Have I put you a bit more in the picture? When one of them assumes office in January '09, Prayer that he or she will and can rise to the demands of the office will be necessary. The last guy sure didn't.

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Hmmm now you want to know how to bet your life savings on our presidential race. Speaking strictly as your professional turf accountant, I think you should skip this one and wait for the Kentucky Derby or the Grand National.

To a degree I can't honestly get a lock on -- it involves Looking Into Peoples' Hearts, still in its infancy as an exact science -- this is going to be a battle of deep and historic voter prejudices. McCain could end up doing surprisingly well in November for the ugliest of reasons: Voters looking at the ballot and thinking, "Well, at least he's a White Man."

You actually have the historic advantage of me. Not long ago it was unimaginable to imagine a black man running South Africa. Now it's happened, your weather reports don't suggest The Sky Fell, you have an electorate of all races that now takes a black man as head of state for granted.

We don't.

Skipping Obama himself for the moment, nothing would please me more than to see America mature beyond this ugly prejudice -- as in 1960 we squeaked past the Historical Prohibition against a Catholic president. But this is a scab perpetually festering in our politics. Whites are still the ones who vote most actively, habitually. The black vote itself has to a shocking degree been disenfranchised, and though [some startling percentage of blacks like] 97 percent vote Democratic, voting in black enclaves remains an embarrassment of low participation.

Much sadly ditto about our historical prejudice against a woman president.

If, after Franklin Roosevelt died in office, his wife Eleanor had wanted the office, she was universally beloved (and for authentically fine reasons and accomplishments), I think she'd have made an easy sweep of it.

But Hillary Rodham Clinton ... since she became First Lady and thus familiar to all Americans (not just the residents of Arkansas, which most people can't find on a map), her clumsy political instincts and her misunderstanding of and sour relationship with the media have made her Easy To Hate. For an awful lot of Americans, all over the political spectrum, and even with lots of women, too, she is just not the face they want to see in the Maturing Moment of our first woman president.

In particular, her efforts to project "the common touch" are (to this cynical old newspaper editor) laughable, comical, systematic serial failures. It is far easier to frame her as a violently acquisitive power-hungry yuppie (need help with that?) lawyer than as a nurturing mother who truly feels the pain of struggling families on the brink of a tsunami of home foreclosures, skyrocketing health-care costs, and unemployment.

But please plug yourself in for this summer's Democratic party convention. We haven't seen a knock-down bare-knuckle broken-bottle one of those in decades. Expect some Harsh Language, and riot police. (I usually don't have much nice to say about Republicans, but they do have much better manners in public.)

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Do you know "l'Esprit d'Escalier?" (See illustration.) I should have added, or feel moved to add ...

Our Jimmy Carter has become famous and admired for flying around this world putting some sort of international Strictly Kosher certificate on national elections. Here (and in Cuba), many jokes are made about how charity begins at home, and how he could best direct his Fair Elections magic on places like Florida and Ohio, states where the machinery of elections is not slowly getting fairer and better, but is criminally corrupt, polluted by partisan politics, and growing worse.

When a tainted or highly suspicious election results in a state governor or US Senator from one particular state winning -- everyone in the other 49 states can live with and endure that. It pains me when a volcano erupts in Peru, but as long as I am in New England, it pains me on the order of a toe bunion, and I'll send a sympathy card, and survive.

But since a notorious Republican-tailored voter redistricting (I'm told our word "gerrymander," proudly invented in my Massachusetts, has found a home throughout the English-speaking world) in Texas around 1995, corrupt and party-tainted elections have spilled their cess onto nationwide outcomes.

This is not unprecedented in our political history, which has always been rough-and-tumble, and often indistinguishable from a continuing criminal enterprise. Our martyred saint Abraham Lincoln knew how to play this questionable game as he rose in Illinois politics, and Harry Truman's very birth as a politician was in the bosom of one of the most notorious of all corrupt political machines, Kansas City's Pendergast Mob. American politics are not for the squeamish or fastidious, and federal prosecutors regularly feel inspired to send powerful state political leaders to federal prison to teach them better sportsmanship.

But except for rare and exceptional circumstances, the voting machinery is scrupulously the property of each state. So the party in charge of that state inevitably "flavors" the election process.

Now there is a rush to abandon paper ballots and Get Modern with computer machinery. So the Monkey Business your teenager gets into on his bedroom laptop is increasingly the Monkey Business that taints state elections and their outcomes. Very little "Jimmy Carter"-style Nannying has emerged to supervise or cleanse or control this troubling trend.

(I know how to program computers, and by an amazing coincidence, I was just elected Governor of West Virginia last year!)

But I bore you with this addendum to caution you that the next president may take office under a huge cloud of suspicion about the vote tally in several large and numerically influential states. In the good old days, politicians had to physically steal and hide and destroy heavy padlocked ballot boxes. Now they're learning to get what they want with a few computer keystrokes. And as paper ballots become extinct, the physical ability to accurately account for a suspect or challenged election also vanishes.