Through a glass darkly, or do I mean smoke and mirrors?

As we crawl groaning through the eighth day left before we can finally trudge down to the ballot box and get it over with, does anyone else have the feeling that this runup has, on both sides, been so comprehensively air-brushed that there's really nothing much to look at, apart from the meta-campaigns?

Almost nobody believes Howard now, not even his own side, when he desperately promises to throw money around on things we all know he doesn't believe in. As for Kevin07, so successful has he been in his refusal to be wedged (and I'm not blaming him for that; it was the only intelligent response) that we don't really know what he actually thinks about anything much -- although as a secular feminist, a South Australian, and a profound mistruster of people who seriously want to make a lot of money, I'm not fooling myself that Kev is exactly my man either.

The liveliest conversations have been about the campaign itself: the Overington/Ecuyer/Newhouse circus; the Garrett and Abbot jokes and quotation marks; the Coalition's ill-hidden determination to get rid of the only electable potential leader they have; the bloody endless graphs and polls and number-crunching, the obsession with which which strikes me as partly a symptom of the popular but narrow- and literal-minded belief that 'science' trumps everything else and can provide all the answers; and, finally, the question of whether or not Julia Gillard owns a skirt.

(I can't decide whether this is more outrageous or less outrageous than the fruit bowl incident or the ongoing fuss about her hair; really it's all part of the same nauseating sexist mindset. Guy Rundle had a very funny Byron parody on the subject of Julia's trousers and the preoccupation therewith in Crikey's early election edition this morning, though I can't believe he missed the more obvious and, in its own quiet way, profoundly erotic Herrick poem.*)

I don't care about any of these things. I want something done about Iraq, water, hospitals, education and grass-roots social reform with a view to a healthier society with fewer crims in it. I don't give a rat's about any of this other stuff.


*Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
Oh, how that glittering taketh me!