Now it's one big smoke-filled room, and we're all locked in. For the last week, the question hasn't been whether we can trust Bush or Kerry, but whether we can trust Dan Rather. Instead of getting to know the candidates, we're getting to know their 527s.

Political life is entirely about the quick and dirty: hit jobs, overnight polls, news cycles, voter vaults, oppo research, ghoulish activists "for truth" who are really "for distortion."

At every turn, strategy defeats candor. Superficiality trumps depth. Lincoln, schminkin. This is the 21st century, and it's all about winning, baby. Watch the political shows for a while, listen carefully to the operatives' patter, and Iraq doesn't feel like a war any more. It feels like a poker chip.

The cheapening of politics is so widely recognized, it's making headlines. "A bruising fight over 'character' has taken center stage in a presidential campaign that once seemed it would hinge more on Iraq, terrorism, and the economy," The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Yet nobody seems to understand why it's happening, not even the sages. "Why the rage, and not a real debate?" asked an op-ed in The Washington Post this week by Elie Wiesel. The Nobel prizewinner didn't have an answer.

So on it goes. THE SLIME CAMPAIGN, announces Newsweek's current cover, offering Vietnam-era pictures of Bush and Kerry, one against a red background, the other blue. As if this were a game show and you had to pick one.

And maybe that's what it's becoming. Every day, this election looks more and more like one of those online-rating Web sites that have become so popular. If you're under 35, you know what I'm talking about. These are sites where people post photos of themselves so that the rest of the world can rate their looks, generally on a scale of 1 to 10.

The names of the sites say it all: Hot or Not, Rate My Face, Rate My Body, Rate My Boyfriend, etc. There are also explicit sites dedicated to ratings of very specific body parts—three guesses which ones—and sites where the ratings are expressly about how bed-able (more precise words are used) the person looks.

Rating sites can be fun. You just go to one—I recommend the non-pornographic HotorNot.com—and an image of a stranger comes up. Take a second, see what he or she does for you, and tick off a number. Instantly, the site counts your vote and reveals the person's overall rating so far, out to 1 decimal point. And delivers up the next person. In a poignant feature, Hot or Not also tells you how long it's been since the person in the photo last checked his or her rating. Some are signing on all day long, to see what the world thinks of them.

News coverage of these sites notes that they are frequented mostly by young people (Hot or Not is "wildly popular among teenagers," reports The New York Times) and offers two different readings on the phenomenon. Either it's viewed with bemusement, as another kooky thing those young folks are doing, right up there with lip piercing. Or it's troubling evidence of our youth gone Terribly Awry.

One psychiatrist told The Times that it's a function of modern child-rearing practices; i.e., this is what happens when kids are constantly praised: narcissistic, approval-starved adults.

But aren't these sites just a natural extension of the rest of our culture? Life in America—the collective life we share through the media—now revolves around pseudo-scientific ratings, from the Nielsens to the Top 40s to Amazon best-sellers, from Consumer Reports to coaches' polls to school ratings to the stock market ... to our utterly poll-driven politics.

If you think anyone who checks his photo rating every hour is nuts, spend some time inside a campaign.

The candidates put their mugs up on the Web—and TV and anywhere else they can buy space—and we rate them, through polls. The ratings are reported instantly and adjusted every time they change. We rate their resumes, their policy positions, their personalities, their military experience, their conventions, their wives, and, yup, their looks.

Washington blogger Wonkette has a running gag about the sex appeal (or not) of the various candidates. John Edwards gets special attention, naturally—the Bobby Sherman look is sooo now. The joke works, because we all know on some level that's what politics is all about. Edwards is at least a 9.5 on the Hot or Not scale.

On photo-rating sites, the underlying joke is the scientific pretense of it all. In a way, they're mocking the very idea of ratings. After all, people play all kinds of tricks on these sites. They post other people's pictures without their permission, alter a picture so the person looks worse than in real life. They put out false information, in order to juice the ratings.

In short, they play the games political professionals play every day.

Everyone knows you can't really rate a person based on an image or a few well-crafted sentences. You can't trust dubious information offered up by people you don't even know. You certainly can't choose a president this way.

Can you?