Does anyone have a skeleton-free closet?

Good news for our republic! I am definitely never ever going to run for the nation's highest office. I couldn't survive the microscopic scrutiny, and I begin to wonder: Could anyone? I had pretty much given up any repressed presidential ambitions some years ago anyway.

The Bushies wrecked John McCain's Straight Talk Express in 2000 with a whispering campaign that he had a black child sort of, you know, on the side. The truth? The McCains had adopted a baby from Bangladesh. Four years later, the Swift Boat Veterans for Slander turned John Kerry, an authentic Vietnam War naval hero, into a model traitor.

This year is even worse for any candidate who isn't into political S&M.

The latest rip tries to declare one William Ayers an anvil and then to throw Barack Obama overboard with Ayers around his neck.

Back in the 1960s, Ayers ran with the Weather Underground -- nee, Weathermen -- which had an unfortunate tendency to blow things up, luckily without injury but with ill intent and unmistakable damage.

These days, Ayers teaches education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been an education adviser to Mayor Richard Daley. He contributed $200 to Obama's run for the state Legislature. He and Obama have served together on the board of a charity, the Woods Foundation, which helps the poor.

So? So, of course, now Obama is supposed to be seen as a closet radical who might start dynamiting banks and military bases at any moment.

Right there, I'd be in the soup if I ever ran.

In the mid-'80s my wife and I held a fund-raising party for a local theater group. At one point, I looked across the room to see Angela Davis, the radical du jour, and William Kunstler, showboat lawyer to radicals du jour, sitting on the couch. I don't know how they got there, but I'd be political roadkill for partying with notorious lefties.

I've never made up a whopper to equal Hillary Rodham Clinton's bravery under phantom sniper fire, but there are a few tales I tell from my life that during the years have been, let us say, enriched by recovered memories. I like the stories the way they are and would recant them with transparent insincerity.

And the list of shakedown fodder goes on. You know the drill: Drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll. French cooking.

The voracious need for filler by cable TV's 24-hour newsmongers keeps what used to be one-day sensations boiling for days, even weeks.

It is serviced by a willful refusal to understand what a candidate plainly is getting at. Obama has said again and again what he believes substantive patriotism entails. He still gets ripped for not wearing a flag pin in his lapel -- a meaningless cliché gesture. Every pol who has been perp-walked from Congress to prison had worn a flag pin.

There is a lot of lofty sounding nonsense being bandied about to the effect that it is important for our candidates to be dragged through the sort of trial by fire that has scorched all three of this year's remaining claimants. Vetting them down to every personal detail is said to be necessary to judge their fitness.

I don't buy it. That's an excuse invented by voyeurs to alibi their voyeurism.

The process is so dragged out, so without self-editing and pity that the only thing it can produce for sure is damaged goods, a new president whose inauguration cannot be cheered unreservedly even by his or her own voters.

Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. E-mail him at teepencolumn@earthlink.net.