Let us take the Davis/Bustamante campaigns at face value: The Republicans said it was all about business and taxes and growth; the Dems said it was about whether Arnie was a Nazi sex fiend. OK, let's take that as seriously as Katie Couric and the rest of the gang did. Every day I get a gazillion e-mails screaming ''BUSH IS A NAZI!!!!'' Also Cheney, Rumsfeld, even yours truly: We're all Nazis. In California, an accident of birth gave the Democrats the opportunity to run with the Nazi hysteria literally. It flopped spectacularly.

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Nazi! Racist! Don't forget Florida! Here's Bill Clinton! It's not much of a message, is it? And, if the party's short of ideas, it's even shorter of stars. The fact that in the most populous state in the nation the two leading Democrats are Gray Davis and Cruz Bustamante is as telling as anything. The gubernatorial pool is where you look for presidential talent, and right now their only star governor is Jennifer Granholm, who can't run for president because she was born in British Columbia. That's why in Thursday's debate half the presidential candidates are sad-sack senators dulled by decades of deal-making and Beltwayspeak and the other half are goofs and oddballs. The shortage of talent is so severe they've had to parachute in Wesley Clark, a man who was playing Republican fund-raisers and waving pompons for Bush and Cheney the day before yesterday.