With Labor Day nearing, a wary nation awaits the premiere of “Dumb and Dumber III: The 2008 Presidential Campaign.” Could it possibly be sillier than 2000, pitting a make-believe Texas rancher against an “elitist” Washington know-it-all who boasted he’d invented the Internet? Of course, Al Gore never said that, any more than George W. Bush could saddle a horse without professional help.

But, hey, it made for a diverting story line: The Stuffed Shirt versus The Cowboy. TV networks ate it up, as, alas, did millions of low-information voters ill- served by the news media’s preference for storytelling over substance. Thus when microphones picked up Gore’s exasperated sighs during his first debate with Bush, pundits made the Stuffed Shirt’s bad manners a “character” issue. Instead of analyzing what made him sigh: The Cowboy’s wildly inaccurate descriptions of his own tax, Social Security and prescription-drug plans.

Exactly how does one politely debate somebody who either doesn’t understand or misrepresents his own policy proposals? Even somebody like The New York Times’ Bob Herbert, who treats Barack Obama as the Second Coming, opined that “(m)ost of America understands that the competence bar is set so low for Gov. George W. Bush of Texas that it’s practically lying on the ground.” Gore, however, was smug, supercilious and “doesn’t seem to realize that in the real world, people hate Eddie Haskell.”

Actually, Haskell’s a TV sitcom character. Not real at all. Nor did most Americans grasp that when The Cowboy charmingly mocked the Stuffed Shirt’s “fuzzy math,” virtually every word was a falsehood. Among name-brand pundits, Princeton economist Paul Krugman was almost alone in saying so. The rest concentrated on Gore’s condescending sighs, his pedantic airs, etc. “American Idol” stuff.

Today, of course, we’re all paying for Bush’s epic dishonesty and sheer fiscal incompetence. Meanwhile, given the stakes in November, you’d like to think Americans had collectively sobered up and would prefer presidential campaign on something approaching an adult level. A job interview, say, instead of TV talent show.

Alas, a shallow, personality-driven race appears to be what both John McCain and Barack Obama’s campaigns want: the Straight-Talking Maverick versus the Technicolor Pied Piper.

On the Republican side, dumbing things down works to McCain’s advantage. Stuck with a presidential candidate who voted against President Bush’s ruinous tax cuts but now says he’d make them permanent? A bellicose former flyboy who makes a joke of singing “Bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” — a reckless, futile act that would make invading Iraq look relatively sensible? (The flyboys always want to hit Third World countries; ask the ground soldiers what they think.) A man of the people who, together with his multimillionaire heiress wife, owns nine houses in several states?

Simple: Attack your handsome, telegenic young opponent as a vapid celebrity like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Fly into a phony snit about Obama’s allegedly “playing the race card,” as if racial politics were even mildly offensive to the Republican base. Contrive a brilliantly inane formula for solving the nation’s energy woes through the miracle of offshore drilling.

Because as H.L. Mencken long ago observed, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.” Never mind that oil companies currently earning staggering profits aren’t doing much drilling on domestic leases they already hold. Nor that oil from such wells wouldn’t make the United States energy-independent, but be auctioned on the same international market as oil from Russia, Venezuela and Iran.

See, for years, simpletons out in Limbaugh-land have been sold the pleasing fiction that “environmentalist wackos” are the source of all energy problems. As Krugman correctly observes, the GOP’s “de facto slogan has become: ‘Real men don’t think things through.’”

As for the Pied Piper, his internationally televised tour of world capitals definitely made him look “presidential.” Except he ain’t president yet. Giving speeches before huge, adoring European audiences was certain to get him called “presumptuous” or worse. For supporters like Herbert to treat that criticism as a racial slur plays directly into Republican hands. As he himself observes elsewhere in the same column, “Every day that the campaign is about race is a good day for John McCain.”

As Bob Somerby trenchantly observes on his Daily Howler blog, race makes everybody stupid. Presumptuous, arrogant, elitist. GOP tacticians have applied these words to all Democratic candidates for a generation. So if the presumptive Democratic nominee doesn’t want the campaign to be racial, why did he give speeches citing McCain by name as somebody sure to say “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills?”

It may have worked against Hillary Clinton in a Democratic primary. But it won’t play against a Republican. Somebody needs to remind Obama he’s running for president of the United States, not the University of Chicago.

You can e-mail Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist GeneLyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.