Jon Ralston waits impatiently for a candidate in a major race to focus on issues relevant to the public, rather than empty rhetoric and hyperbole

Wednesday, July 12, 2006 | 7:19 a.m.

Beware the Ides of August.

It's only a month before the primary and my patience already has evaporated. Perhaps this is a product of aging, but I have little ability this year to put up with the startling condescension that most candidates have for the media and the electorate. So many are selling such snake oil - and that is an insult to snake oil salesmen.

Never before have so many candidates stuck empty or disingenuous rhetoric in voters' faces and asked a simple question: How stupid or ignorant are you?

Consider a few illustrative examples:

On the GOP side, Rep. Jim Gibbons is hiding so his foot doesn't find his mouth in public, state Sen. Bob Beers is all about the TASC at hand and Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt is not in the hunt.

On the Democratic side, where the real primary is taking place, Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson is on the air saying state Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus is in the pocket of telemarketers and insurance companies and is responsible for the state's failed education system. (And in her spare time, I understand she advocates for Jonathan Swift 's modest proposal.)

Say what you will about Titus - and there is a lot to say - but this is a flaccid attempt to try to vitiate the impact of her pay-to-play campaign against Gibson. It's just silly.

Titus' campaign isn't on a much higher elevation, blaming Gibson for higher power rates because he once had an obscene contract with the utility. Sure, that deal smelled, mostly because as mayor he shouldn't have taken a contract with a publicly regulated utility. But Titus' shameless and hyperbolic exploitation of that one issue is about all she has in running a campaign without a manager(!), without enough money and without too many allies.

And then there is Barbara Lee Woolen, a pseudo-Nevada businesswoman, with a California-based movie equipment company with an office here, trying to buy the office with ads touting her commitment on illegal immigration. She keeps insisting she can do something about the issue, including an ad with a faux Guardsman, but there is no evidence she has any idea what the job really entails. And my guess is she couldn't find Elko on a map.

Next to this motley crew, businessman Bob Unger, who actually wants to make something out of the job, and Treasurer Brian Krolicki, who has ambition to spare, are rock stars.

And yet here we are: Williams puts out a mail piece saying Giunchigliani raised more than $3 billion, including the largest tax increase in state history in 2003 - many of those tax increases that Williams also supported. So Giunchigliani, ratcheting up the chutzpah meter, puts out a piece (and this is priceless) accusing Williams of voting for "Nevada's largest tax increase in the 20th century" - what Giunchigliani doesn't mention is that she also voted for that 1991 boost, so she is a two-century record-holder.

What a tangled, sticky and repulsive web.

Some of this is the media's fault for letting the candidates get away with this stuff and not calling them on it. Much of it is the electorate's fault for being so willfully ignorant, all the while bleating about how negative everything is and how all of them are scum.

But most of the culpability should fall to craven candidates, who either are too afraid to be who they are or simply cede all decision-making to handlers who know how to throw gasoline on the voter fire of the moment. It's a toxic combination. Thus I repeat:

Beware the Ides of August.