In Washington, D.C., they’re talking about flag-burning, gay marriage and other hot-button social issues, and that never bodes well for a campaign season marked by real discussion on real issues affecting real Americans. It’s going to be a long five months.

The Senate had the good sense last week reject a constitutional ban on gay marriage, thus knocking down some of the wind propelling the schooner the Republican Party had hoped would sail candidates into office in November. But we could yet join ranks with democratic luminaries like China, Cuba and Iran with an amendment that would save citizens’ collective soul from flag-burners and at the same time save politicians from actually having to address the pesky issues of healthcare coverage for the uninsured, sticker shock at the gas pumps, education and the like.

We could be wrong, but there appears to be no pandemic of flag-burning, unless Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist knows something we don’t and flags are being burned in protest outside his Capitol Hill office with some regularity. Frist said something recently on Fox News Channel about an anti-flag-desecration amendment being important to Americans’ hearts and souls. As long as he and other elected officials fail to speak as passionately about the founding principles of our government expressed in the First Amendment – which, the courts have ruled, extends free-speech protection to flag burning – he’s probably right about that.

The killing last week of al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was certainly

a fortuitous development. Even if the flag-burning amendment vote goes the same way in the Senate that it has every year since this loser of a law was proposed in 1995, the president and his party can happily talk about how well the war on terror is going and deflect anyone who wants to talk about faulty intelligence, exit plans and mental-health services for returning veterans.

Make no mistake, Democrats are just as capable as Republicans of pandering when they’re holding the keys to the castle, and American voters allow the affront.

We’ve become so accustomed to having our emotions exploited that we don’t bat an eye at a suggestion that state-sponsored murder of convicted child abusers would actually protect innocent children from child abusers, for example.

Emotion-filled sound bites don’t belong in campaigns, even if such rhetoric is part of a growing trend in politics. If the 2006 election is about achieving change, it must first be about changing that.