In a piece titled "Obama Rebounds From the Wright Stuff," Bill Bradley said something that worried me:

Yesterday's CBS poll has even better news for Obama, showing him opening up a lead on Clinton again and also leading John McCain. This is a pattern we saw a while back when Wright's sometimes incendiary sermonizing became a round-the-clock staple of cable TV, talk radio, and the blogosphere. As the shock wore off - in part due to its constant repetition - Obama rose up again. The same pattern happened again with Bittergate.

I don't mean to sound like a scold or a moralist here, as I want to make a simple observation about what I think is an unconscious (and illogical) mechanism, and what might arise out of a perfectly natural human reaction to shock inundation.

The schock factor -- and things that shock -- drive the news cycle, the talk radio cycle, the blog cycle, and even the fashion cycle. When elections are factored in, timing becomes critical, because there's an initial shock, then a wave of repetition, and than finally (when enough people tire of it), it tends to fizzle. Jeremiah Wright keeps coming back, and generating new shock waves, but there's only so much to be said, and only so many people who want to dwell on it 24/7. Most people -- no matter how informed they are -- do not belong to the Jeremiah Wright junkie subset of political junkiedom. Not even your ordinary political junkie can keep it up on the level of all Wright shock, all the time. (Thank God for Bill Ayers; at least there's shock rotation!)

None of this is said to minimize Wright or Ayers -- as I've said I think the latter is far more egregious than the former, and justifies not supporting Obama. I am just saying that the ordinary citizen cannot be expected to be shocked all the time by the same thing, simply because of a steady diet of shock.

But would anyone expect him to? Well, yes. Every time I turn on the radio, there's a steady diet of "new" shock -- most of which is not really new, but just being turned over. You could turn over a rotting carcass you'd seen before in order to express horror over "new" maggots crawling, but would it really be horror?

My worry here is that while news, talk radio and even blogs are often driven by a desire to compete for the shock factor, what is the effect over time with ordinary people? Do they become harder to shock? If so, might that account for the erratically cyclical nature of the shock waves?

More ominously, what are the longterm effects in terms of voting patterns? We've all heard about the backlash, or blowback principle; how might this work with ordinary voters? Clearly, this is why last-minute shockers are the most effective; hence every negative campaign that wants to be effective should always aspire to the perfectly timed so-called "October surprise."

But what would happen if people were tired of surprises in advance?

I'm still thinking of Mayor Street's bug! For those who've forgotten, the FBI planted a bug in his office during a corruption probe. Normally, the discovery of such a bug shortly before an election would doom a candidate -- especially a candidate behind in the polls as Street was. But in Street's case, race and BDS were brought into play, and the FBI bug scandal was transformed into a major advantage, with Street seen as a victim.

Sympathy blowback is neither predictable nor rational, but in the right hands, it works. Are some partisans better at playing this game than others?

Nor have I forgotten the way the Monica Lewinsky scandal created sympathy for Bill Clinton in such a way that ultimately, the crime of perjury was subsumed into his sex life. While some Americans sympathized with Clinton, many more came to sympathize with him by way of reaction against the people who screamed about the immorality, and who demanded that everyone else be as shocked as they were.

Of course, the Lewinsky scandal occurred before blogs, and before the Internet was as influential as it is now. That phenomenon we once called "the news cycle" is now aggravated by so many things that it's unpredictable. Millions of people are shocked, millions publicly weigh in, millions tune out, and millions react against the shock.

What happens to the issues over time? How are normal people to determine to what extent they are issues, and to what extent they are fuel for cycles?

Honestly, I don't know anymore. While I know what I think about any given issue, I'm don't like repeating myself, and I'm beyond cynical.

It would be unreasonable of me to expect people to be shocked if I am not.

The more shocked people want me to be, the less shocked I am, and the more annoyed I become by those I perceive to be demanding that I be shocked.

Is there such a thing as shock burnout?

(Maybe that'll wear off too, so I can focus on "issues.")

BOTTOM LINE: Wanting to shock people is natural enough, but scolding them into being shocked can backfire if they become annoyed.