This period between the end of the primary contests and the party conventions next August is the weirdest part of a US presidential election.
The experts agree that the American public refuses to focus on the election of the most powerful person in the world during the baseball season. The election season only gets going after Labour Day on September 4th.
So what are candidates supposed to do if no one is paying attention to them? Avoid making those bloomers that the media inevitably home in on is probably the best advice.
This is easier said than done. They have to keep campaigning, making speeches, kissing babies, waving at crowds and all that. They must try not to fall.
Around this time four years ago, the Republican candidate, Bob Dole, fell off a platform when a handrail broke and television showed his undignified plunge into the crowd over and over again. Maybe viewers got a message that this airborne figure was just too old for the job.
Rick Lazio, Hillary Clinton's opponent in the New York Senate race, is not old at 42 but he should have tried not to fall on his face and split his lip in his second week of campaigning. Who could miss that symbolism?
George Bush is staying on his feet literally and metaphorically after a bruising primary campaign against Senator John McCain which left him groggy. He was apparently easy meat for Vice-President Al Gore, who had sailed through the primaries against Bill Bradley.
But now Gore is seen to be in trouble again. Democrats are complaining that he has let Bush off the hook and that his campaign is floundering.
The Doonesbury cartoon strip devoted this week to Clinton advising Gore to loosen up, as people prefer the "class clown" to the "class nerd". Clinton urges him to "reactivate" his Tennessee accent "or arrive drunk - anything to soften you up".
In real life, Gore has just been dubbed a "slum landlord" for trying to evict a poor family with a retarded child from a rundown house with blocked lavatories on his Tennessee estate.
When the family's plight was publicised on local television in Nashville, Gore, who said he was not a "hands-on" landlord, rushed to have the lavatories unblocked and to invite the tenants to dinner in his own mansion. But the Republicans cannot refrain from asking how this man can look after a whole country if he cannot mind his own property.
The Democrats, who had hoped to run television ads showing Bush campaigning at the anti-Catholic Bob Jones University, now have to worry about Republican ads showing Gore tenants living in Dickensian squalor.
Gore's advisers have come up with yet another "new Gore". The man who could hardly make a sentence without using the word "fight" and loved to poke fun at Bush is now going to be the "positive Gore". The insults will be left to "surrogates".
There was good news for Gore from a "focus group" survey ordered by the MSNBC cable television station. The idea was to find out the "real feelings" of the guinea pigs about Gore and Bush.
Probably all sorts of deep thoughts were unearthed during the two-hour session, but the one the media focused on was when the group was asked about dating and mating the candidates. The women in the group unanimously chose Gore over Bush as the one they would date and marry. One woman said she "could trust Gore to come home at night".
The women found Bush too flashy. He was the kind who would drive up in a sports car, carry you off to a night of partying but probably never call again. Earnest Gore would pay more attention to your needs.
The men, incidentally, all preferred Bush for a guys' night out. Well, I think most of us would, even if Bush has not touched a drop since he was 40 while Gore has been known to take a beer.
So good old dependable Gore is now about to use a TV advertising blitz to tell the sick and the elderly that he will protect their medical schemes and lower the cost of drugs, while Bush would blow the whole thing if allowed get away with a $1.3 trillion tax cut.
The ad shows an avuncular Gore "fighting" for the elderly's prescription drugs. But the ads do not ask you to vote for Gore and so are classified as "issue" advertising. This means they can be paid for by so-called "soft money" which is unregulated, unlike the "hard money" raised specifically for the election campaign, which is strictly limited.
"Soft money" has become dirty money in American politics following the widespread abuses of the last presidential campaign, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore wiped out Bob Dole with the help of a massive advertising campaign.
This was paid partly with funds from White House "coffees", nights in the Lincoln Bedroom and, in one unforgettable episode, a Gore visit to a Buddhist temple in California where monks and nuns with a vow of poverty somehow could write cheques for the Democrats.
In spite of all the breast-beating and pledges to bring in campaign finance reform, both Gore and Bush are getting ready to spend huge amounts of "soft money".
Gore promised not to use soft-money ads unless the Republican Party did it first. But now he is going to be the first, because "all I know is that there have been lots and lots of negative soft-money ads running every day all over the country against me".
There have been some ads like that but they are paid for, not by the Republican Party, but by shadowy groups exploiting yet another loophole in the campaign finance laws. But Gore is taking no chances.