The Penis Game--featuring the Democratic candidates.

David Hasselhoff has nothing on me. My reindeer-nose red 1994 Grand Am is now the ultimate campaign trail vehicle, a souped-up T-72 of political journalism. Just take a look at the equipment inside.

A short list of items in the trunk: one full army uniform, complete with West Point hat; a gorilla suit; two cervical collars, one in 3.5-inch size, one the full four-incher; a stretch black pinstripe suit, three sizes too small for me; a plastic briefcase containing two dozen mini-cassettes and a booklet of Beyonce stickers; a CD of pet clip-art with 6,000 pictures of dogs; the complete works of Devo; and some other unspeakable items related to personal hygiene for use in emergency situations.

Additionally I have, behind the passenger-side visor inside the car, an auxiliary set of gorilla hands. At some later stage of the campaign I'll be able to explain what all of this is for; I really can't get into it too much right now. But there is one new piece of equipment that I'd like to discuss. I broke it out two weeks ago. It's a white sailor hat covered with marks from a black magic marker. Residents in New Hampshire can guess what this is all about because it is a tribute to a New England sports legend, the great Bruins goalie Gerry Cheevers. Cheevers used to carve a notch in his mask and color it black every time the thing saved his life. He played a long time and by the end of his career, you almost couldn't see any white in it. He was scarier than Jason.

I wear the hat every time I watch a candidate speak. And every time he mouths the phrase along the lines of, "It's about creating jobs," I make a black mark. In two weeks, I have almost three dozen marks. The last one came at Wes Clark's "major economic address" at the UNH-Manchester campus the other day ("That is why we need to do whatever is necessary to create jobs?"). John Kerry, I've observed, is good for two marks per appearance.

With a few notable exceptions, the speeches of the candidates are a revoltingly dependable mish-mash of about nine or ten cliches. This is political oration written with a fork; you take a dozen or so key words ("challenge," "hope," "opportunity," "leadership," "security," etc.), arrange them on a bed of lettuce and serve them up one after the other in between statistics-laden bitching about the Bush administration. The rest of the presentation is pretty much all window-dressing: flags, slogans, pins, tallness, a tan, a backdrop of mute ethnic minorities. And unless you've lost your voice (as Clark did last week), you punctuate the whole thing with a lot of shouting, hysterics and goofy gesticulations?pound your fist and do a looping double thumbs-up at the phrase, "?for our children!" The next day, the New York Times calls it an "impassioned address."

Hopefully someday a dedicated taxonomist will make a full map of campaign cliche phyla. I've tried to get a start, but it's a monumental task. The complete catalogue would make a great drinking game for campaign trail journalists; one beer per cliche would leave us all wasted by 11 in the morning. Here's a short list of some of the candidates' more laughable habits:

Right here in ???! The absolute king of campaign speech cliches, it's as though the campaign were an elaborate homework assignment in which the teacher told all nine students to "Write a stump speech containing the phrase, 'Right here in New Hampshire!'" Every last one of the candidates does it, even Dennis Kucinich, who normally uses an exponentially smaller number of cliches than the other candidates. Again, Kerry is the master here. In the last speech of his I caught, at UNH in Durham last Monday, he did it twice (i.e. "Right here in New Hampshire, President Bush made a promise to deal with the four major pollutants?"). During the debate in New York a month ago, Al Sharpton delivered a beauty: "Right here in Queens," he said, "we read Bush's lips. He lied." The debate was held in Manhattan.

Americans for America! A few weeks ago, I went into the chamber of commerce in Claremont, NH, and asked where I could find the Gephardt campaign offices. A woman named Alicia Beck, the executive director of a community-development association called Main Street Claremont, laughed. "It's on the fourth floor, I think," she said. "Just go up there and you'll find it. It probably has a sign that says 'Americans for Gephardt' or something."

Actually the sign said, "Guaranteed Health Care for Every American."

All the candidates have the "America" slogan front and center, and the way each of the candidate's approach this hideous prerequisite says a lot about their campaigns. Probably the driest is "Dean for America," although that one is a little weird, too. (Is that what America needs? More "Dean"?) Edwards' "Real Solutions for America" is, like the candidate itself, roundly mocked by journalists for its hand-up-your skirt cheesiness. The Clark slogan is appropriate for a babbling, senile old codger in the last death-throes of a terminal ambition-sickness: "New American Patriotism." (A Clark staffer snapped at me last week when I asked if it was in opposition to the Old Foreign Patriotism.) And the Kucinich effort, "A Prayer for America," might as well be a sign that says, "Dump my books."

The penis test. Campaign oratory has worsened considerably since the advent of the dial-survey?that hideous research technique in which test subjects are asked to turn a dial to one side (favorable) or another (unfavorable) in response to words spoken by candidates. The results of these surveys guarantees that certain words will be repeated ad nauseum, often forced into places in the text where they don't belong, to fit some kind of mandatory quota.

Curiously, traditional Democratic dial-survey words like "compassion" and "healing" have given way this election to "tough" Republican words emphasizing strength and fatherly qualities. Last week I did a test to see if any candidate could give a speech without using some combination of the following words less than a total of 100 times: challenge, responsibility, leadership, hope, values, opportunity, principles, future, patriotism, protect, tough choices, change, action. Turns out I overestimated things?slightly. I don't have the final results yet, but it looks like the average for a stump speech is actually about 50. (The Clark address last Wednesday came in at 61.)

If you ever want to pass an amusing half-hour, download a candidate's speech and use the find/change function to replace all of those words with the word "penis." The results will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about modern political speech. Here are some samples:

Clark, Oct. 22: "The New American Penis is not just about matters of war and peace; it's about jobs and penis and penis right here at home. It's about taking penis for our shared penis. It's about reclaiming what's been lost, but also about building a better penis for all our children."

Dean candidacy announcement, June 23: "The Americans I have met love their country. They believe deeply in its promise, our penis and our penises. But they know something is wrong and they want to take penis. They want to do something to right our path. But they feel Washington isn't listening. And as individuals, they lack the power to penis the course those in Washington have put us on."

But the best penis I've yet encountered was a Lieberman speech on Sept. 15 in Manchester: "We have a penis to make the penis of our country better by penis the penis of this nation!"