The health industry doesn’t blush about advertising its creative powers to save us from every agony and grief uncovered by medical science in the last 4,000 years. It can replace our organs, reclaim our youth, exile our carbs and resurrect our sex.

For this reason I’m depressed that a resourceful HMO hasn’t found a way to rescue some workable sanity in our kitchen and to liberate my wife and me from the daily shakes induced by the coming election. The problem is fundamental. We’re on the same side, and it’s chewing us up.

I believe millions of people are suffering from this condition, today, as we speak, anguishing over the sight of John Kerry earnestly pawing at the starting gate, for the last two months.

Years ago the stock household melodrama in an election year revealed husband and wife bunkered at opposite ends of the breakfast table, separated by a pitcher of maple syrup and a tube of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. They sit motionless, staring at each other in a posture of stonewall hostility. Raw contempt steams from their ears. One spouse is a Republican, the other a Democrat. The warm zephyrs of last night’s mutual trust and love have disappeared in the ashes of the untended toaster.

The silence is broken in a frail attempt at conciliation by one of the spouses. “How could you be so arrogant?” is the first question. “How could you be so misinformed, so completely close-minded and dogmatic when we talk about the election?” This, the spouse decides, is a measured way and civil way to begin the dialogue.

The other prefers to rise above this unseemly diatribe with a compact statement of view:

“Screw you,” the second spouse says, successfully launching a day of recrimination and defamation in the house.

I want you to be the first to know that no such crudity disfigures our morning conversation on politics. My wife and I are unreconstructed Democrats. We are admitted internationalists and believe something can be done for starving children and to slow pandemics beyond surface promises to appropriate billions sometime in the future. We have collaborated on a book describing the worldwide success of a movement to put small loans into the hands of the ambitious poor. We don’t believe trillion dollar deficits and offshore tax-dodging contribute to America’s economic stability or do much to solve the country’s school crisis. We don’t think perpetual war is democracy’s highest calling. We don’t hug trees but we do try to protect them when we see public forests being prepared for sawdust and two-by-fours by a president subsidized by the timber industry.

So why are our mornings degenerating into grim treasure hunts through the morning newspaper to learn whether Kerry is any closer to establishing a clear identity with the American public?

Our problem is that we both want to manage Kerry’s campaign. We think the country critically needs regime change and, discounting some of the end-of-the-world rhetoric, it will probably be the most important election we will see for the balance of our lives.

“Kerry’s got to engage Bush, every day,” I said the other morning. “He’s got to do it hard and without compromise. He’s got to tell Americans who are getting run over by tax cuts for corporate insiders exactly what Bush and the corporate insiders are doing, which is stealing from the shareholders, the rest of the taxpayers and the vulnerable. He’s got to tell them every day that unless they vote in November the Bush crowd can steal another election. He has to ask, “where do thieves get off calling their opponents wimps?” He’s got to convince the undecided voters that he can change the country’s direction, a direction that worries them about paying medical bills and about their children’s education and future. But to do that he has to be a warrior. He’s got to show them the truth about Bush’s double talk. He’s got to bear down on how often and how airily Bush ducks responsibility, blaming his blunders and deceptions on any moving target in sight. Kerry’s got to tell America every day how Bush has been hiding the truth of what it’s cost the country to conduct a needless war. He’s got to talk every day about what it costs the taxpayers to lubricate even more millions for Bush’s funding friends, and how this translates into less schooling for their kids and less fairness for America. And that all of this is lot more destructive to America than Kerry’s voting shifts and political dances.”

There was silence in our house.

“Are you finished?” my wife asked.

I nodded. “Mostly, I agree with you,” she said. “Why are you shouting at me?”

“I’m not shouting,” I said. “Well, I AM shouting but not at you.”

My wife munched thoughtfully on her blueberries and yogurt. My wife hates scenes. Our political talks are not exactly that. We come to our table talk out of contrasting environments. I grew up in a Balkan enclave in the mining country of northern Minnesota. There the decibel levels of conversation can compete with a passing freight, if not in power than often in intensity. My wife’s forebears came to the Western Hemisphere a few years after the Mayflower landed. She attended Harvard and has worked with the Rockefellers and Fords. I, on the other hand, have hobnobbed with Rudy Perpich, Jeno Paulucci and Boom Boom Brown.

“What’s this exclamation they use on the Iron Range when the talk gets loud and heated?” my wife asked.

“They say, ‘just because I’m yelling at you doesn’t mean I’m mad at you,”

“So that when you yell…”

“I’m being emphatic.”

My wife took this revelation under study. Usually after an exchange like this we withdraw into our morning pilgrimage through the newspapers. My wife subscribes to the New York Times. I read the Minneapolis Star Tribune, for which I wrote for 35 years. Naturally, we share the more sterling contributions in each and usually settle into a quieter conversation about the potential impact of the day’s news on Nov. 2. There are times I’m convinced Edwards would have been a better choice for the Democrats. She, on the other hand, worries that our national self-indulgence is going to mean open-ended abandonment of oppressed women and starving millions around the world.

None of these conversations ever end with the sudden discovery of a Yellow Brick Road to serenity.

We stashed the political talk in good temper, however, and got into the car. I drove her to the airport for a board meeting in Washington. After five minutes of Mozart we started talking politics.

We talked politics on Hwy. 494, on Hwy. 394 and on the ramps to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. We were squeezed for time because of Minnesota’s annual celebration of summer, the reconstruction of roads and rerouting of traffic. We babbled politics for miles, and then I said:

“Migawd, the ramp to the airport. I missed it.”

We were halfway to the southern Minnesota cornfields before I reversed and came back to the ramp.

“My fault,” I said. “I should have been watching the signs.”

Susan responded with Mayflowerian grace. “It was just as much my fault,” she said.

“You’re generous,” I said. “But I was the guy who goofed.”

My wife frowned. “Please don’t try to tell me whose fault it is.”

We almost missed the flight.

I have to believe this is happening all over the country. But I’m saying, all right, the election, Bring It On.

I told my wife: Let mercy reign. There are nearly four months to go. $400 million worth of political advertising and sound bites. It may be a photo finish. Which happens first, America saves its soul or loses its mind?

My wife was sweet about it. “Whatever you’re predicting,” she said, “let me be the first to know.

“But tell me softly.”

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar