Our current electoral reality is that there is very little to say about the 2008 elections, which presents a problem to the hordes of media types assigned to "cover" the candidates and "non-candidate candidates".

Pew reports that most people have heard of Hillary Clinton, a growing number of Barack Obama and few know what is going on with the Republican candidates. A lack of interest in the Republicans?

More likely an MSM obsession with the "chick" and "black guy"--an oasis in a story desert.

Now everyone has heard of Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York seeking the Republican nomination, right? Not lately, the Pew poll found: Only 3 percent of those surveyed said they had heard about Giuliani in the news lately. Same goes for Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona – just 4 percent said they’d heard of him making news. Read more here and see the results of the Pew report: 'The GOP's Invisible Men: Democratic candidates dominate the news.'

It may be tough to make much news on the crowded stage of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on a hilltop in Simi Valley, Calif., where 10 – count them, 10 – GOP candidates will assemble for a 90-minute debate carried live by MSNBC starting at 7 pm CDT. Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, will moderate the encounter.

Do you get it? The job of the presidential candidates is to "make news"--presumably to make life easier for the press corps.

Of course every presidential candidate knows that his (or her) job, is not to make any news, but to stay on message. What they really want to do is convince you that they are on your side, that they are "good guys".

Mitt Romney was on the Tonight Show last night, yucking it up with Jay Leno, showing the American public that he was funny and "normal" in spite of being 1. A Mormon 2. Filthy rich 3. Smarter than you 4. Handsomer than you 5. Happier than you.

Its what he has to do at this point in the "game".

What remarkable in all of this is how often the media, poised as they are to jump on any "news" so often miss the boat on the real news.

In every election some conventional wisdom is swept aside. Be it that third party candidates can't influence the race (Ross Perot won 19% of the popular vote in 1992), that sitting presidents have to wait for their opposing party to pick a candidate (Bill Clinton ran negative ads more than a year before the 1996 election and went on to be the first Democrat to win re-election since FDR in 1944) or that an Internet-based campaign can't threaten an establishment candidate (Howard Dean surged, if briefly, past everyone in 2004), conventional wisdom is only right until it turns out to be wrong.

Ironically, that quote comes from a John Fund article that spins-up the non-candidate candidates and their dark horse prospects to win the nomination. Fund seems to have forgotten that the dark horse is and always has been "conventional wisdom" since Abraham Lincoln, the original dark horse made it so. He and others also seem to confusing media boredom with voter boredom:

In 2000, blogger Mickey Kaus refined the Feiler Faster Thesis, which holds that though news cycles are constantly getting faster, "people are comfortable processing that information with what seems like breathtaking speed." This rapid pace may be transforming presidential politics. Voters aren't waiting for pundits to tell them who is running for president, and shadow candidates can run low-cost guerilla campaigns using the Internet, talk shows and word-of-mouth. "Candidates have been running so long already it opens up opportunities for late entries," says Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com. "We may not like it, but voter boredom may now be a driver of politics."

Voters are hardly bored. They routinely poll as quite concerned over a number of national issues. The real problem is that candidates run not on vision but on coalitions of voter constituencies. A candidate risks a lot by exercising real leadership. In the early stages in particular, its money that drives the process and that means a lot of toe-sucking.

Newt Gingrich promises to change all this, by running a candidacy on ideas so profound, so brilliant that he will single-handedly realign the politics of the country. I wish him well, truly I do--we could use this kind of leadership, but that simply isn't are reality.