A person should be elected to public office only if he or she demonstrates strong character.

However, it appears that no candidate can be elected to office in America without belittling their opponent, twisting that person’s record and casting aspersions on their moral fiber. Using these methods demonstrates something close to the opposite of strong character.

That’s some catch, that Catch-22.

Here’s my plan: two years from now, when the sure-to-be-brutal presidential campaigns of 2008 are lashing us like the first blizzard of winter, I will have stopped watching commercial television entirely. Or at least I will have moved on to watch only on videotape, so I can skip the ads. Maybe I’ll even have TiVo capabilities by then. Not sure how that works at this point.

As a replacement for campaign commercials’ dreadful bits of disinformation, I’ll spend more time reading objective reporting about the political races, I vow. Although we might be getting less coverage of statewide and local races then, because the daily newspaper business isn’t exactly booming. It’s easy and even entertaining to read the national coverage in the big-circulation magazines, but everywhere in the country, local coverage will continue to dwindle.

Eventually, we’ll have less objective information about our choices than voters had in the 19th century, when they voted for candidates they had never seen or heard.

Of course, political advocates were no more noble back then. The cartoonists cranked out ape-like caricatures of Abraham Lincoln and no doubt wished for a wider audience. And Lincoln, for that matter, was quite the political manipulator; that guy would have been delighted to run TV spots showing how much taller he was than the rest of the pack.

No, the difference resulting from 150 years of progress is that now we have the power to grab instant, massive attention, and we can’t stop ourselves from abusing it. It’s so much more exciting to call people names when you have the ear of thousands, not just your friends on the school bus.

That’s why Halloween season brings spooky shots of missiles and terrorists, eerie close-ups of politicians at their least attractive and, worst of all, the infuriating distortion of everybody’s voting record. Wouldn’t it be great if each bill were about one particular subject, so we could really sort out who voted for what? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be done?

Every time we hit this point in the election cycle, we wonder if it could be any worse. Oh, sure it could.

Last week’s Time magazine mentioned the Internet trickery being employed in this year’s campaigns. Online, it’s so easy to pretend, and too much fun not to. You can pretend to be a supporter of Candidate A and then torpedo him with false information. You can pretend to be privy to all kinds of details that actually came out of nowhere.

The Internet also holds the power to do good, but good is not so easy. A recent column in The Wall Street Journal detailed the declining influence of Project Vote Smart, a sincere, bipartisan online effort to gather and disseminate the facts about candidates across the United States.

“But lately, the number of candidates taking the survey has dropped dramatically,” the column said. “The reason: Many are afraid their opponents will use the information against them in attack ads.”

My youngest child says that when he gets to vote, he’s only going to vote for the candidates who refuse to run negative ads.

Such a naïve way to look at it. You can’t base your vote on something like that, because …

Hey, wait a minute.