CAMPAIGNS TODAY SEEM WITHOUT END.

Byline: Joseph Honig Local View

WELCOME to the pre-campaign for the presidency - no, strike that. Make it the seemingly endless campaign.

For baseball has arrived. So have spring and summer wardrobes. And the race for the White House is in our laps. Each day and every day, has been for months.

There are, already, commercials. Attacks and responses. Hungry, careerist writers pouncing on early missteps and staff changes.

How difficult it is to think of a finite campaign season when, increasingly, electioneering seems almost constant.

After all, we've endured years of exploratory committees and water- testing. A winter filled with high-stakes primaries. And now, the Democratic nominee no longer has ``presumptive'' in front of his name. Sen. John Kerry runs for president and the incumbent, George W. Bush, presses flesh a good four months before Labor Day, once the start of traditional campaigning.

And some of us may be the worse for wear.

For there are polls to consider - even at this early date. There are candidates' tax returns to mull. There are campaign stops and questions about military service and voting records. Meanwhile, there is a foreign insurrection to quash. An economy to massage. There are enduring fears of terrorism.

Time was, American politics had an ordered pace. A half-century ago, you could feel it in the still-vibrant city of Detroit. There, in Cadillac Square, Democrats kicked off bids for the presidency. In September. (Republicans also informally acknowledged that campaigns started at summer's end.) You could feel it, too, in photos of campaign trains and rallies snapped in crisp autumn winds. Hard to believe, but nominees of both parties once started sparring and swanning in football weather.

That was then.

Now candidates brave arctic winds months before primary voting. Once anointed, they swelter in shirt-sleeves on southern beaches in May. Reporters as well have helped elongate our great national horse race. There are personal histories to be checked. What candidates said or did in college. No longer are these fall revelations. We get them half a year - or earlier - before ballots are printed.

Suspense suffers. Drama loses out. A payoff, a third act, looms somewhere in the faraway future. True, we are better off without smoke-filled hotel rooms, without kingmakers picking candidates in August. That said, political conventions have lost most news appeal. They are, at best, coronations. Gavel-to-gavel coverage disappeared years ago. Why televise the inevitable?

Maybe it all gathered steam back in 1972, during the McGovern-Nixon contest, not really much of a battle at the time. But Democrats radically opened the delegate selection process, weakening party czars. Republicans, after a fashion, followed suit. Primary voters felt emboldened as never before. Impossibly early campaigning - not simply hunts for supportive bosses and ward healers - began in earnest. Long, seemingly relentless presidential campaigns became enduring parts of the body politic.

A greater focus on primaries meant more money - tens of millions of dollars - was required for campaign fuel. Gradually, with years spent on the stump, the business of running for president became a nine-figure industry.

Truly, the process has become somewhat onerous. Not only for voters, but, presumably, for contenders, too.

Campaigns, once designed with precise, orchestral movements, now experience peaks, valleys, dips and spikes too numerous to remember with precision. Momentum, measured daily, is gained and lost. There are months of potential minefields. For the electorate, issues and positions may grow hazy over so much time. Focus can be lost. Sad to say, repeated commercial images offer relief to those flummoxed by almost continuous parries and ripostes.

A solution? Maybe compact campaigns? Who's kidding whom? Recall years of congressional debate over election finance reform. Arguably, the windup was half-baked; astonishing amounts of so-called soft money still flow into politics. Unlike Britain, where races are publicly financed - and where, by law, national contests are limited to weeks - we have become the United States of campaigns.

With miles to go before Act Three.