Well, with Clark dropping out of the presidential race on the Democratic side and it's looking more and more like John Kerry will be the nominee to face Bush (although I'm still very much in the Edwards camp), there is one issue that I just don't want to hear any more about.

It's the subject of military service.

Yes, we all know Kerry was a war hero in Vietnam.

And yes, we all know that Bush (as well as Kerry) was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had his Dad pull strings to get him into the Guard to keep him safe from Vietnamese jungles and the Viet Cong (hey, I would have pulled every string possible if either one of my 2 sons were faced with having to fight in that fog of war).

But that was 30 + years ago. I'm not the same person I was then and I doubt either one of these 2 guys is either.

So I hope that the national debate on these 2 candidates focuses on today's issues and today's problems and today's vision of how each of them will solve those problems. As Kerry himself said during the 1992 controversy over Bill Clinton's efforts to evade the draft: "We do not need to divide America over who served and how."

There simply are too many dangers facing this country abroad - and too many fundamental disagreements between the candidates on how best to meet them - to be focusing an inordinate amount of attention on who did what 30 years ago.