THE BELL CURVE:

Nervous time. Last column before a critical presidential election that demands primary attention.

But there’s nothing that hasn’t been said and written over and over. Sarah Palin isn’t funny anymore. Just shrill. Joe Biden was never funny. And Joe the Plumber and “palling around with terrorists” and “real Americans” have been hashed and rehashed an exhausting number of times by Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama, leaving only crumbs of irrelevancy for columnists and bloggers.

So I’m left with a quick trip through my file of unused ideas that are outdated and properly redundant for an election-eve column. Flotsam and jetsam from the waiting room for election results.

I read with interest the reader response to the Pilot’s invitation to join the debate over the movement to lower the legal drinking age from 21 to 18. When I was instructing Navy fighter pilots in World War II at the final training stage before they joined a squadron, I was 22 years old, and most of my students were younger than 20 (as was the senior George Bush in an adjacent squadron). A lot of them didn’t come back.

I recently read an article in the Los Angeles Times saying that 60% of the American men and women now fighting in Iraq are between the ages of 18 and 29. None of the Pilot responses made a point that jumped out to me. It seems the height of hypocrisy to send young men and women off to risk their lives in a war while telling them they’re too young for a beer. Or two.

I suspect our Founding Fathers would be wondering where they went wrong if they were introduced to the amounts of money being spent by candidates for city council seats in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. The possibility of buying elections — especially at the town meeting level — hadn’t yet entered the debates over structuring a new and revolutionary concept of governing.

From the multimillions expended on the national election to the six-figure support of local candidates, the core question is the same: What’s the pay-off here? If it is shrouded in armies of lobbyists and political consultants at every level, then the question becomes, who is paying them?

And why? If the answer in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa is to serve the citizens of these communities with good and responsible government, then the question becomes: Is it worth $100,000 — or whatever is needed to outspend the other candidates — to win one of these seats?

Further complicating the question in Newport Beach is a local philanthropist and retired industrialist named Jack Croul who has invested heavily in factions supporting the location of a new city hall as well as the city council candidacy of Dolores Otting.

Although there is a strict limit on the amount one person can donate to an individual candidate, there is no limit on funding through an “independent” group. So even if Croul’s funding were perfectly legal and based on selfless motives, it clearly tips the table of the electoral process to the disadvantage of opposing factions or candidates who can’t match this windfall.

So isn’t it time to level the table and require everyone to play by the same set of rules so elections can no longer be so easily bought?

Finally, two historic events took place in the year before I was born. And both — if I can be allowed a small stretch — have corollaries in our upcoming election.

First, American women, after decades of trench warfare, won the right to vote in this democracy. And, second, the first president they helped to elect, Warren G. Harding, has almost universally been recognized by historians as the worst president in our history.

So where are the corollaries? The election of 2008 has made it quite clear that women have become major players not just as citizen voters but as candidates for the highest offices in this land. And that George W. Bush has, in a landslide, displaced Warren Harding as the worst president in our history.

Although the polls strongly suggest otherwise, until the votes are in we remain in danger of hog-tying our government for the next couple of years, at least, by seating one party in Congress and the other in the White House. This isn’t a time for such checks and balances.

It seems very clear that the Democrats will make even bigger gains in both the Senate and House of Representatives, possibly with a sufficient majority to override a veto. Putting a Republican in the White House under such circumstances would divert primary attention and effort to political infighting instead of the enormous problems the Bush administration made its legacy.

The Democrats are going to have to deal with the mess of pottage handed off to them by eight years of Republican misgoverning. Since that means taking the heat if they don’t begin to turn it around quickly, the Democrats should have a clear hand, in both action and responsibility, in taking it on. The electorate made that choice thunderingly when we faced a similar crisis in 1932. We need to do it again Tuesday.

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