Is the electorate disgusted?

Barack Obama has been called the postpartisan presidential candidate, but Republicans have one, too, in John McCain.

It is difficult to picture either of them smearing an opponent or letting backers do the smear. If supporters outside their campaign tried the kind of swift-boating that blew up John Kerry's candidacy in 2004, can anybody imagine Obama or McCain failing to react quickly, loudly and insistently to demand the operation stop?

On the other hand, it's easy to imagine Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney disassociating her- or himself from the attacks -- yet quietly not disapproving, either.

What else can be expected from Hillary and her husband, The Man Who Did Not Have Sex With That Woman? The couple has made it clear once again that the divisiveness of the 1990s cannot all be blamed on Republican slime merchants.

In a way, one can't help but admire the subtleness with which they brought up the race issue to hurt Obama, like when Bill Clinton dismissed Obama's South Carolina landslide by pointing out that Jesse Jackson won the state in 1984 and 1988.

The triangulation is brilliant: Here was the "first black president" stating a straightforward fact of American political history, that a particular Democratic candidate of the 1980s won South Carolina twice, but never got the nomination -- and there he was, also, reminding us at the same time that it's a black thang, you see.

Not that Republican slime merchants have gone away, either. Just as brilliant as Clinton's Jesse-equals-Barack moment was Mike Huckabee's decision to withhold a particularly slimy television ad -- then releasing the spot at a press conference, thereby making sure it aired in news stories (for free!) and made a splash on YouTube.

As for Romney, no one is going to outpander the clip-art candidate. The former Massachusetts governor (was the entire state on drugs when it elected him?) doesn't just look like a model for those generic drawings of an office "boss" that illustrate a thousand cheesy brochures. He sounds like a cartoon, too.

In Florida, Romney decided the best strategy was to drone on about how John McCain was not a true conservative because he works with Democrats too often, was endorsed by the liberal New York Times and considered being John Kerry's running mate while he, Mitt Romney, is the real heir to the Reagan legacy of family values, low taxes, small government ...

Yawn. Everybody knows the rest. Romney's unwillingness to speak in any language other than quarter-century-old Republican boilerplate leaves him as a candidate without a single interesting thought or original initiative.

But that, of course, is good enough for doctrinaire fanatics who listen to Rush Limbaugh, just like the discreet viciousness of Billary goes unnoticed by drinkers of Clintonite Kool-Aid.

Are there enough Democratic voters who think it's a good thing that Obama reaches out to Republicans in promising sweeping change? Are there enough Republican voters who admire McCain for risking his conservative credentials by standing up for sensible immigration policy?

Are there enough voters who have had enough?

- Roger Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology.