Throughout last year’s presidential campaign, the thing that most excited me was not Obama’s oratory, Hillary’s histrionics or Sarah Palin’s comic relief. No, what really got my blood pumping was the prospect of the campaign ending. Each day, it seemed, brought another spurious scandal, another two-bit soundbite, another breaking story of shocking inconsequence. Invested as I was in the future of the country, my main concern was with the end of all the idiocy.

And, for a time, it seemed that the obsession over politics and politicians that had dominated the media for the past two years had finally run its course. News outlets turned to stories like immoral investors and Red Sea pirates, reminding us that there’s more to the world than slogans and poll numbers. Alas, this shift in focus now seems to be just a hiatus. What we thought was a hangover has turned out to be just another night on the town, and the hair of the dog that bit us is the unending coverage of our democratic representatives.

Take the brouhaha surrounding Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s senate-seat-sale scandal. In the good old days, a prairie state governor caught selling government offices for favors would have been chastised and put out to pasture, a mild reminder that sometimes bad deeds are punished. Today, at the faintest whiff of corruption, the 24-hour news organizations descend like vultures, their ever-decreasing stock of reporters assigned to inane assignments like investigating the governor’s hairstyle or creeping outside politicians’ homes.

Take an article published on Jan. 30 in The New York Times, which summarizes one reporter’s tag-along day with old Rod as he begrudgingly left office. The reporter watches as the disgraced governor, “tracked by news helicopters following his sport utility vehicle’s every turn en route to the airport,” packs up Elvis statues and waxes pretentious about his fate. If it weren’t for this type of coverage, we would never get such golden nuggets as: ‘“I wonder if we’ll have to hitchhike home,” he said. “Maybe we could take the bus.”’

What’s going on here? Are we not satisfied with the fact that an arrogant, self-aggrandizing moron got caught and is headed out of power? Do we really need an up-close-and-personal view of his final minutes of ignominy? And why is this so fascinating?

The past few years have seen an accelerating conflation of the political and celebrity cultures. In the halcyon days of the news and entertainment divide, drunken starlets and drug-busted actors were treated with degrading intimacy, while politicos, no matter what their transgressions, were given a wider berth. Today, however, governors and senators have practically pushed out the Lohans and Winehouses of the world, monopolizing the bathroom-sex and male-intern-flirting scandals. TV networks now cover impeachment trials like they used to cover the more scintillating trials of O.J. and M.J., and even tax-return delinquency is sensationalized more than good old rock-star debauchery. The result, sad to say, is that politics has become just another sideshow in our gleefully sadistic celebrity-watching culture.

The most obvious example of this brave new world of political voyeurism is the case of George Galloway, a British M.P. who starred for three weeks on the reality TV show Big Brother in 2006. Sharing a house with a group of other dysfunctional attention-cravers, Galloway entertained the boob tube masses with such stunts as dancing in a leotard and pretending to be a cat. This doesn’t do much for the dignity of public office, to say the least.

But Galloway is the exception in that he willingly sacrificed himself to the nasty world of tabloid journalism and reality TV. In most cases, our dear leaders are the unwilling victims of a media establishment that’s lost its sense of purpose. Take the circus that surrounded Sasha and Malia Obama’s first day of school on Jan. 5. For hours on end the major news networks featured commentary on the girls’ choice of backpacks, their prospects for successful social lives, even their first week’s lunch menu. Perversely fascinating as it may have been, it wasn’t news.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with pursuing politicians and putting them in the spotlight. One of the most important roles of the media is to catch leaders in their lies and to discourage wrongdoing with the prospect of humiliation. But when this attention shifts from sober accounting of misdeeds to useless speculation of, and even disturbing obsession with, the details of representatives’ private lives, our society suffers. Politicians, never the most modest bunch, become even more self-important, their misdeeds and convoluted rationalizations given fuel by the attention the media lavishes on them. Personality rather than policy becomes the salient concern in political debate and we end up being governed by a bunch of self-regarding morons.

We’ve had enough in-your-face political coverage in the past year to last us a lifetime. So instead of focusing on impeached governors’ packing lists and the first kids’ dessert options, let’s take a step back and let the licentious legislators and exhorting executives humiliate themselves in relative peace. If not for their own good, then for ours.