Good Morning!

It's just about a perfect New England weekend. It's wall-to-wall sunshine, temps expected in the upper 60s, calm winds...and it's Columbus Day weekend, too.

That means it's "peak foliage season", that magical time of year when the last green leaves have changed to their brilliant fall colors, and before the earlier leaves start to change into their yellows and browns. If you catch it just right, it can be a spectacular sight to behold.





So, this gives rise to the local phenomenon known as "leaf-peeping". This weekend, thousands of Bostonians and other urban-dwellers will be clogging the byways of New Hampshire and Vermont. Some will stay for the long weekend, but the vast majority of them drive up one side, cross the beleaguered Kancamagus, then head back for home with nary a stop. On days like this, traffic in the north country can rival downtown at rush hour.

But is that any way to experience nature? Whipping past a scenic overlook at 50 mph, or jumping out of the car for a 2-minute stretch while snapping a picture is hardly any way to see and understand it all.

October is also when election season is gearing up. We've got our leaf-peepers here, too. Only now, with a couple of weeks to go, are people really starting to pay attention. I don't think that's any way to elect a candidate, but what do I know?

We've spent months here dissecting the races, debating the issues, and seeing just who it is that might just best represent our interests in Washington. I'd like to think that over time, we've really made a genuine effort to understand.

The "leaf-peeper" voter will turn on the TV the week before the election and will be bombarded by negativity. It will then be a matter of wading through who is the "least evil" candidate, even if they are being defined by the other side. At times like this, whoever screams the loudest usually wins.

I have a pet theory that this is how the Republicans always seem to win. The Democrats labor on, often in obsurity, to make incremental changes in the way things are. In the President's nearly 2 years in office, there have been an impressive string of legislative successes and improvements that will make real changes in people's lives.

But the leaf-peeper candidate will look at yesterday's job reports, and hear the negative ads that the stimulus failed, the Democrats are ineffective, and who knows what else. On election day, our leaf-peeping voter knows only that those in power can't get the job done, so why not give the other side a try?

Perhaps it's all a part of the ongoing attention-deficit, dumbing-down of America. You can't have an intelligent, in-depth discussion about anything these days. But those Fox graphics sure do look snazzy, don't they? Kind of like those pretty leaves by the waterfall you just blew by at 60 mph on the way to the next overlook.