RALEIGH – I’ve been enjoying a highly productive August vacation.

Should “highly productive” and “vacation” be used in the same sentence? Hey, celebrate diversity – we all have different needs and preferences.

With wife and kids off to the beach for some R&R, I stayed home this past weekend to engage in a little R&R – and I mean readin’ and ‘ritin’—of my own. I completed another chapter of my forthcoming book Selling the Dream: Why Advertising is Good Business. (In a gesture of deepest benevolence, I will resist regaling you with my latest discoveries about the history of public relations or how comedian Jack Benny so effectively advertised Jell-O.) For me, getting out from under the chronological dictates of my publisher is at least as enjoyable as getting sand under my toenails or waiting in long lines to eat out-of-season oysters.

Besides, it appears that I’m not the only one who isn’t taking a normal vacation. State and national politicians are campaigning furiously this month despite the fact that Labor Day has traditionally been considered the start of the electoral “homestretch.” For Republicans in the 5th and 10th congressional districts, the explanation is obvious: they must choose a U.S. representative. The GOP runoff contests between Virginia Foxx and Vernon Robinson in the 5th and David Huffman and Patrick McHenry in the 10th are getting – to paraphrase a certain pre-Lockean contract theorist – nasty, brutish, and mercifully short. We’ve got a week and a day to go, and accusations of negativism, cronyism, egotism, and (gulp) liberalism are rampant.

In the latest developments, Foxx is touting a poll showing her 10 points ahead of Robinson, but he seems to be outraising her significantly and thus could be better situated for last-minute ad buys. In the 10th, McHenry scored a coup by getting both of the Republicans not making the runoff – George Moretz and Sandy Lyons – to endorse him, along with previous Lyons supporter and outgoing Congressman Cass Ballenger. Long-rumored irregularities in Huffman’s campaign finances have now also been confirmed. On the other hand, Huffman’s 22-year tenure as sheriff of the district’s most-populous county, Catawba, isn’t going to hurt him in a low-turnout runoff.

At the gubernatorial and presidential level, timing considerations are also keeping the candidates busy. Republican gubernatorial nominee Patrick Ballantine is trying to capitalize on his burst of momentum in the latter stages of the primary campaign by traveling around Eastern North Carolina. Republicans are also dealing with the last-minute passage of a “campaign finance” bill by the General Assembly that blocks some corporate-funded independent expenditures of the kind that the Republican Governors’ Association ran against Easley in 2000 and planned again in 2004. Don’t be shocked if some RGA-sponsored advertising targeting the governor materialize in August so as to fall outside the law’s 60-day window.

For similar reasons, John Kerry and John Edwards will stay on the hustings during August to try to maintain momentum from the Democratic National Convention and to offset the effects of having to “go dark” in campaign advertising due to timetable considerations (independent expenditures targeting Bush will run in August, however).

Is all of this happening too early to influence a November vote? There are conflicting views on this, but I’ll refer back to some research on advertising effectiveness for my book. There is an important distinction to be made between direct-response advertising and delayed-response advertising. The former contains messages such as “order today and get an extra month’s supply of our useless junk” or “vote today a get an extra four years of useless …” – well, you get my point. The latter is designed to build a brand, to set the stage for a buying decision in the future. Given the likelihood that the 2004 presidential election will turn on last-minute events – economic data, perhaps, or news from the war – it’s probably a good idea for each side to define its political brand now.

Or in the Kerry-Edwards case, its various brands.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.