By Kelsi Peace, Managing Editor

Grow up, America.

Perhaps the 2008 presidential candidates are more attractive than most, or maybe the country’s anticipation for a new Commander-in-Chief bested them, but somewhere along the way the campaign started looking more like a high school student council election and less like a presidential campaign.

And at least in high school the students have the class to pretend they elect their president on merits deeper than good looks.

But in Washington and along the campaign trail, the race loses some of its integrity as attention turns to shallow issues, and the candidates are treated more like celebrities than serious politicians.

On the cover of its November issue, Radar, a controversial publication that prides itself on its scandalous reporting, crossed a line in making a point.

Mocking a 2006 issue of Vanity Fair, which pictured Tom Ford, Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson – all seminude – Radar lined up Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Rudi Giuliani the same way.

The spread was done in jest, to make a point that candidates have become “as manufactured as movie stars,” according to www.radarmagazine.com, but the point would have been better made with the candidates photo-shopped onto fully clothed bodies.

“As we set out to plan the cover of Radar’s politics issue, it seemed appropriate to do a little facile packaging of our own,” the introduction reads. “What better way to underline the ego, excess, and artifice that dominate modern politics than to borrow a page from Vanity Fair’s now-notorious 2006 Hollywood issue?”

Plenty better ways to illustrate such a point exist than further perpetuating the sexually- charged race that makes a laughingstock of our country’s most visible office.

And Radar is simply picking up a pulse that beats along the whole campaign. Although not endorsed by the candidates, Obama Girl, Giuliani Girl and Hott 4 Hill girl shimmy in support of their candidate on YouTube, and very well could provide name recognition among the younger voting demographic.

The videos are mildly suggestive yet entertaining – and intended to be facetious – but these women receive national attention they shouldn’t. Clinton catches flack about showing a little cleavage – and that distraction diverts from her message.

Obama is often hailed as the campaign’s heartthrob, and if it’s not Obama, than it’s attention to John Kerry’s haircare routine.

Perhaps this phenomenon is similar to our love for turning great literature into cinema – the general public might not read, but they will watch a movie, and so great stories still are told.

And many won’t read up on the candidates’ stances on war, abortion and the death penalty. But they might pick up US Weekly, and if Obama happens to be on the cover, somehow absorb some small grain of political awareness.

The consumer sends a message with his or her purchases and Web site visits. If presidential campaigns have become manufactured and excessive, it is only because we, the American people, have allowed it.

At the end of this excruciatingly long campaign, I hope our president has more to offer than a little eye candy – or it could be a very shallow four years.