Who cares if John McCain and his wife own seven houses or condominiums? Who cares if Barack Obama knows William Ayres, the now-respectable militant of nearly 40 years ago? The entire presidential election campaign seemed in imminent danger of degenerating into the “who cares” category where the only solace to a thinking man was the anticipation that it only has two more months to go.

That is until former President Bill Clinton and then the Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joseph Biden, old veterans from the political wars, got things back on track with a couple of rousing speeches that sought to emphasize the differences between their ticket and the one Republicans will officially nominate next week in Minnesota. They were a refreshing respite from the steady drumbeat of negativism from both campaigns.

Until then the first of the four-day pep rallies that masquerade as once-important conventions had done nothing to convince those with just a modicum of intelligence that the Democrats have the solution to the nation’s problems or that their candidate is in any way different from his opponent other than his race. Next week’s Republican version is expected to be just as shallow. It still will be a miracle if these overstaged extravaganzas sway any significant number of undecided voters despite Hillary Clinton’s appeal to her troops to enthusiastically back Obama.

Of course, television still pretends these affairs are important enough to spend millions of dollars on. But that is a lie made increasingly transparent by the fact that national network coverage has been limited to just one hour of precious prime time. What a hoot to see the overpaid stars of broadcast trying to recreate the atmosphere of those days when there was actually some drama in the quadrennial gatherings.

One can still get gavel-to-gavel coverage on several cable channels if one is willing to sit through hours of almost stultifying overlaid analysis about what is going on, which is nothing. Before Clinton and then Biden took the floor to delineate the issues, the convention couldn’t salvage even a pretense of drama by allowing the traditional roll call voting to proceed. The balloting was cut short by the contrived theatrics of Hillary Clinton stepping up to reinforce her previous display of unity by making the whole thing unanimous.

But let’s get back to McCain’s houses/condos and Obama’s acquaintances. McCain has them because he is married to an extremely wealthy woman. It really has nothing to do with his ability to determine the needs of a faltering economy. John F. Kennedy had a number of residences and so does the last Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry, who also has an extremely rich wife.

So what if McCain looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights when asked the gotcha question aimed at making him appear uncaring and unfeeling while half the houses in America are in foreclosure? The resulting television commercial to convince us that he is insensitive to the plight of the downtrodden is such a threadbare attack Democrats should be ashamed. Here we go again, Herbert Hoover.

The equally offensive effort to connect Obama to the militants of the Vietnam War era is just as disgusting. Obama was in elementary school at the time. The link to the past is his acquaintance with Ayres, once one of the notorious members of the Weather Underground that took college protesting into the criminal dimension in the 1970s. Well, hundreds of students at the University of Illinois-Chicago also are acquainted with Ayres, who has been a respectable professor there and an expert on public-school reform for some years now.

Does this acquaintance mean that Obama is a militant in pacifist’s clothing who consorts with traitors? What does it mean? It means only that the rotten-tomato throwers are alive and well and now in this campaign. Good old guilt by association, no matter how slight.

We hope the two old veterans, Clinton and Biden, put things back in perspective, that both campaigns will begin talking about what matters in a deliberative, non-hysterical manner. If nothing else, the three scheduled debates between Obama and McCain should help lift us to a higher level so that we can concentrate on deciding who might have the best answer to all those problems we do care about. Otherwise, in a little over two months voters whose hearing already is in danger from the constant thunder of negativism will be left to toss a coin for either the multi-housed one or the one who knows a former student radical.