Jeff Jarvis and Tony Pierce are agitating for a clean campaign — no Swift boat vets or TANG whacking or faux Purple Hearts or Kitty Kelly coke. They argue that what the candidates did 10-30 years ago a) is irrelevant to current and future performance AND b) won’t impact swing voters.

Funnily enough a journalist asked me yesterday whether moderate bloggers could ever attract monster traffic like those of top Blogads sellers. I had pointed out that us/them punch-fests are much better for traffic than on-the-onehand/otherhand-wringing. The journalist suggested “perhaps the moderates could piss both sides off.” Maybe Jarvis and Pierce will spark something like that. Perhaps the restless political dialectic has finally produced a defined and angry middle, the anti-mud party, to serve as a new pole.

Me, I’m not joining the anti-mud party.

I disagree about a) and b). Neither Jarvis or Pierce are swing voters and so miss the muddy point. The electoral reality is that swing voters will swing on only two things. First, character. Learning about a man’s past and watching him weather criticism of that past — trivial or serious — tells a lot about who he is and will be. Second and more importantly, momentum. Like it or not, studies of undecided voters find that they tend to vote for “winners,” the guys who seem to be ahead on election day. Sad but true.

So the winner will the guy who muscles through the mud-slinging. To wish otherwise is noble, but a waste of key-strokes.

Downloaded p2p phone service Skype this AM. Later in the morning, noticed that images on sites were slow/no loading. Turned Skype off, browsing returned to normal. Anyone else have this problem with Skype?

OK, found a couple of threads suggesting others share my pain here but nothing in Skype’s user forums.

Update: things are working smoothly today. Hum.

A mystery solved in Prague. (Via M. Welch.)

We drove up the Blue Ridge Parkway Sunday and enjoyed hiking the Graveyard Fields trail. (Here are some someone else’s pictures of the area.) Taco (now 37 pounds) got the longest walk of his short life. In the falls at the top of the valley, we found a orange and brown salamander, speckled exactly like the small granite basin he lives in. Wedged among the rocks at the bottom of the falls, a boy spotted a dead fawn, probably swept over the falls in a recent downpour. Finally, we saw a tiny ring necked snake. The moist trail, warmed by the day’s steady sunlight, smelled like a perfume shop. I hope we can go back and see what it looks like mid-winter, assuming the parkway isn’t snowed shut. (Here’s another hike two miles up the road we should consider.)

Blog maven and CBS Marketwatch columnist Frank Barnako picked up on the Sex and the City blogad order.

BTW, blogger and radio commentator Hugh Hewitt, having run that blogad for a few hours, decided to put principles over money and take the ad down, after hearing from readers arguing that Sex and the City doesn’t necessarily square with his Christian conservative worldview.

Some people worry that bloggers are more susceptible than publishers — who’ve taken lots of ethics classes in journalism school or school — to being bent by advertising. I’ve always felt that the contrary holds. In contrast to traditional corporate publishers, each blog has a single decision maker, perfect transparency and point-blank accountability. In short, everybody knows where the buck stops.

Andrew Sullivan declares: “I CANNOT SUPPORT HIM IN NOVEMBER.“

Three engineers go for a joy ride.

Just sent out an avalanche of blogads, our biggest single order yet, for Sex and the City. Something I really wouldn’t have expected a year ago.

Stuart Elliott in the NYT on the proliferation of political motifs in ad campaigns: “Rather than waiting until fall, as they usually do, to introduce advertising with election themes, agencies are already infusing commercials, Web sites, promotions and print ads with images of voting booths, campaign buttons, flags, debates and conventions. These trappings of democracy are being augmented with copious references to compassionate conservatism, hanging chads and states colored red and blue.”

Watch this space today and you may see a new sexy blogad that typifies this trend.

Google.com circa 1997. (Via NewYorkish.) Amazing how consistent and simple Google.com has been.

Check out how badly New Yorkers and GOP delegates misperceive NY’s demographics. New Yorkers think 35% of their fellow citizens are on welfare. GOPers think its 24%. The reality is 6%. Similarly, New Yorkers think 20% of their peers are millionaires. GOPers think that 13% of Gothamists are Seven-figured. The reality? Less than 1%.

In general, do survey respondents usually assume the curve’s tails are much fatter?