James Carville mellows out.

It'll be several months before the locusts emerge in the Northeast from their 17-year hibernation, creating double-time employment for gardening crews (a GOP plot to help the economy, of course), but I can't imagine the racket caused by the pesky creatures will pump up the volume in an already extremely noisy country.

The political hysteria in this election marathon has reached such a pitch that even James Carville sounds relatively normal. We were on a family drive last Saturday and Carville was preaching to the converted on NPR?don't ask; my wife is a fan of Car Talk on the taxpayer-funded radio station, and once that grating hour is over no one flicks the dial?answering questions about the presidential dogfight. He got his licks in, saying that although George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are pleasant men who undoubtedly helped their kids with homework, the present administration is the worst since Attila the Hun's. Or something like that.

Yet even Carville, who's been somewhat inconspicuous since CNN's Crossfire was banished from primetime to the afternoon muddle of soaps, Oprah and Dr. Phil, was having a hard time mustering much enthusiasm for any of Bush's potential challengers. He did rebut the notion that Wesley Clark's a psycho (a day's work in and of itself), and had some kind words about Joe Lieberman, which was sporting since no Democrats except a few New Republic editors are giving Al Sharpton's self-proclaimed soul brother the time of day. I think Carville's just pooped out after becoming a celebrity in the 90s, making millions of dollars and trying to see how many steaks he can eat in one day. After all, the only consolation he gave NPR listeners was the underwhelming opinion that the Democrats have "at least a 50-50 chance" of winning back the White House in November.

At least the Mellowin' Cajun, who's still as thin as Sen. John Edward's resume, hasn't fallen prey to Bush's alleged conspiracy to fatten up the American population. On Jan. 17, the Financial Times ran a pip of a headline, which was only surpassed by the report found below the byline of Neil Buckley. "Bush accused of failing to act over obesity," was the attention-grabber, and then the FT writer wrote, "Anti-obesity campaigners have accused the Bush administration of siding with the food industry to try to sabotage efforts by the World Health Organization [WHO] to curb the global epidemic of obesity." How strange.

Unless my mind, cluttered with too many John Zogby daily tracking polls, is on the fritz, I thought the "global epidemic" was famine, not gluttony. Buckley continues: "The WHO initiative comes against the background of soaring rates of obesity and obesity-related illnesses worldwide. The problem is most acute in the U.S., where two out of three adults are overweight, nearly one in three is clinically obese, and obesity rates in children have increased 50 percent since 1990."

This "news" may be welcome to Al Gore, who spoke to an adoring crowd at the Beacon Theater recently about global warming, on a day that was so frigid Bill Clinton must've chuckled heartily at his estranged veep's total lack of political horse sense. The Times' Bob Herbert was mesmerized, however, and probably wasn't even wearing thermal underwear when he wrote this following nonsense on Jan. 16: "The fates dealt Mr. Gore and the United States a weird hand in 2000. He got the most votes but the other guy became president. And the country, its Treasury looted and its most pressing needs deliberately ignored, has been rolling backward since then."

But Gore, who's reinvented himself more times now than Richard Nixon?his impersonation of William Jennings Bryan while endorsing the sour Howard Dean was just the latest costume change?will undoubtedly pick up on this dubious story and claim that Bush is a "moral coward" for allowing McDonald's to stay in business.

My eyesight is far from perfect, but if 33 percent of U.S. adults are "clinically obese," they certainly don't reside in New York, London, Houston or Baltimore, cities I've lived in or visited recently. Maybe it's all the steroids professional athletes are swallowing or mainlining that have skewed this questionable statistic, but it's more likely that the WHO bureaucrats have seen too many photos of Teddy Kennedy in the New York Post or National Enquirer.

Meanwhile, a front-page story in last Sunday's Washington Post by Dana Milbank and David Broder lamented the highly partisan tone in Washington, D.C., recalling Bush's 2000 campaign rhetoric of trying to minimize "gotcha" politics and unnecessarily mean-spirited exchanges between the two parties. Never mind that most Beltway reporters and commentators (with the exception, perhaps, of Broder, an old-timer who does seem to believe that differences should be put aside by the time cocktail hour arrives) relish the acrimony, if only because it gives them juicier stories.

The Post manners duo quote Thomas E. Mann, a scholar with the liberal Brookings Institution, as saying that Bush, after such a contested election last time around, might've restored civility by cooperating more with the Democrats. Sure thing, Tom. And friends think I'm naïve in believing that Curt Schilling will start, and win, three games for the Boston Red Sox in this year's World Series.

Mann said: "[Bush] had opportunities to make some headway in that regard, but in every case he decided he had higher priorities. He might have considered changes from [his] campaign platform. Instead, he picked one issue, education, but for everything else, he played hardball."

Count me among those who strenuously disagree with the think-tank resident, considering that Bush got snookered on education, has yet to veto a spending bill, imposed steel tariffs, is proposing a $1.5 billion expenditure promoting marriage and was fairly wishy-washy on the subject of affirmative action. But what did Mann expect? Bush promised tax cuts and delivered them; he advocated a stronger national defense and kept his word (unaware of the nightmare that would follow nine months into his term); and, unlike Clinton, didn't acknowledge the international outlaw Arafat as a legitimate leader.

Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman, injected some reality into the Post story by making this point: "Had [Bush] changed his agenda because of the election circumstances, it would have meant a weak presidency. It would have damaged him with his own base and not gotten him that much help from Democrats."

Besides, polite politics is an oxymoron, despite U.S. Senate members addressing each other as "sir" or "madam." Liberals?hear them roar!?were undoubtedly revved up when Kennedy, making a speech in D.C. last week referred to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz as the "axis of war" and claimed Bush used "scare tactics" to intimidate Congress into authorizing the Iraqi invasion. Who knew that John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and Edwards were not only afraid of lions, tigers and bears but also the Moron From Texas? Kennedy continued: "The administration capitalized on the fear created by 9/11 and put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth to justify a war that could well become one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy." Worse than his brother's, in today's jargon, "Vietnam adventure"?

GOP Majority Leader Tom DeLay shot back: "[Kennedy's] hateful attack against the commander in chief would be disgusting if it were not so sad." Two days later, DeLay was after Democratic bigwigs Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi, who complained about this and that Bush plan, the latter of whom said the president presided over "a government of the few, by the few, for the few." DeLay, by my count the 151st politician or journalist to invoke George Orwell this month, countered: "Sad as it is to say, Democrat leaders only agree on two things: they hate President Bush, and they want to raise your taxes. After three years of sitting on the sidelines and booing from the bleachers, this is all they can come up with? All they have to offer is a creepy, Orwellian mantra: Bush bad, taxes good."

Now there's some dang swell fightin' words. Even better than the Post's Jan. 13 headline?"What an Asstro!?after Roger Clemens gave the finger to George Steinbrenner by signing with Houston to join Andy Pettitte.

I don't often agree with the blessedly less-ubiquitous Michael Kinsley, but he was half right in dismissing Paul O'Neill's confessions to Ron Suskind as those of a spurned fellow. Kinsley concluded his Jan. 15 Slate column by saying: "The only solid punch [O'Neill] lands on President Bush is unintentional: What kind of idiot would hire this idiot as secretary of the treasury?" Bush, like Clinton, is not an "idiot," but both men certainly weren't perfect in their cabinet selections. O'Neill was a stupid choice, just as Madeleine Albright proved that the former president wasn't always fully awake.

One hopes that the last word on the O'Neill non-story belongs to Bob Dole. When asked by Time's Michael Duffy about Bush's when-I'm-out-of-office plans to send a man to Mars, Dole replied: "I say, send Paul O'Neill instead."

Finally, The New Yorker's "Annals of Communication" writer Ken Auletta provides one brilliant blast of insight in his long, perfunctory Jan. 19 article about the Bush White House's dismissal of the mainstream media. It was provided by Bush himself, but no matter.

Auletta led with the months-old scoop that the president doesn't spend much time reading daily newspapers. He writes: "'How do you then know what the public thinks?' a reporter asked, according to Bush aides and reporters who heard the exchange. And Bush replied, 'You're making a huge assumption?that you represent what the public thinks.'"

Apparently, Howard Dean agrees with the man he hopes to replace, if Maureen Dowd's mad-as-hell Times column last Sunday is any indication. Miffed that Dean, who's learned that the media builds candidates up only to then trash them (with the obvious exception of St. John McCain), reneged on a tentative interview, Dowd essentially proclaimed that the doctor's campaign is all but over.

She writes: "I went to Iowa hunting Howard Dean. His campaign said he might give me five minutes. On the phone. At first, five minutes sounded pretty cursory. But I decided to be philosophical. Out of his 15 minutes of angry fame, Howard Dean was willing to devote a third of it to me? I never got the five minutes with him. Which left me five minutes to think about why his candidacy was sputtering."

I wonder how the column would've read had Dean invited Dowd to a Des Moines pancake breakfast and then a full hour of private quality time. It's just an educated guess, but Dean's "steely determination" and "gutsy campaign innovations" might've trumped his "angry fame."

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