THE BELL CURVE:

The Super Bowl offered me a brief and welcome respite from politics but wasn’t financially rewarding. I lost 10 bucks in a pool, and now realize I should have followed my first impulse and taken the Giants with 12 points. So you win some, and lose some, which is a cliché of limited solace to both the New England Patriots and the people with buried hopes after the election returns came in last week.

But the campaign beat goes on for another 10 months, and if that sounds like eternity, think how it feels to the candidates left standing. Permanent jet lag.

Fractured sleep. Fast food. Endless small children to kiss. The Brits have it right. They limit political campaigns to a couple of months. We drag them out to the limits of human endurance.

A little self-discipline and the upcoming therapeutic effects of baseball — sans the Roger Clemens show — can at least make this tolerable, especially for political junkies like me. Until November, we‘ll be watching political “debates” — which aren’t debates at all but rather glorified news conferences — in the probably forlorn hope that the questions asked of the candidates will get substantive answers instead of setting up political speeches for them.

That possibility can be considerably enhanced by the use of one simple interviewing tool: the follow-up question. Then when John McCain says that he won’t pull our troops out of Iraq — even if it takes 100 years — until we have won a clear victory, he would be asked what, exactly, constitutes a clear victory and how many casualties or increased national debt he would accept before pulling us out. Or Hillary Clinton would be asked if she feels she made a mistake by her Senate vote to allow the president to launch an undeclared war without Congressional approval.

Under the rules established for current campaign debates, it’s one-and-out for the questioner. And unless the next questioner departs from his agenda and asks a follow-up question related to the previous answer, the sticky questions mostly don’t get asked.

This brings to mind a favorite practice of President Franklin Roosevelt, who was a master at besting reporters at news conferences. He would avoid follow-up questions by hurrying on to the next questioner after he had made his point. The reporters of that day, even though they represented avidly competing newspapers, were wise to this and finally got together and agreed to pursue a subject through successive reporters until the original question had been directly addressed. This not only got more and better answers but also delighted FDR, who enjoyed the game.

So if we are going to be subjected to 10 more months of political debates, the pain can surely be mitigated and the national interest served by allowing — even encouraging — follow-up questions.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.