For most of us here, the campaign for Kentucky's governor just got real.

A flesh and blood candidate came to Grayson County last Friday afternoon in the form of a one-time professor who once seriously considered buying this newspaper. He leaned on a pick-up truck and talked to people here like a neighbor, which he is, being from Bowling Green.

Jody Richards, current Speaker of the House of Representatives in Frankfort and a Democrat, spoke to a small crowd at a fund-raising meal at the Centre On Main, the small crowd not surprising in a county where two-thirds of the voters are registered Republicans. It was too late in the day for it to be called a brunch, so it was a cross between a lunch and a supper, a lunper. Did the Republicans send a spy, though? I think it was the guy who looked too much the part of a Regular Joe. It's easy to spot a Grayson County Democrat; they have that junkyard dog glint in their eyes.

The candidate for governor didn't eat. He said he was a politician and would rather talk to people than eat. The rest of the Democrats there ate, which they can do nearly as well as Baptists. A few doggie bags went home with them.

Because I was on deadline, the sit-down interview with Richards was a sketchy one, but he did show a grasp of what Kentucky once was -- the state that led the nation up to the Civil War -- and that history is reflected in what Richards calls his Plan for a New Kentucky.

In the distant past, Kentucky was The First West and a seedbed for leaders who would settle the rest of the country. Thomas Jefferson complained as president that the East Coast was backward on education, meaning “we have to send our children to Kentucky to get a good education.” Lincoln knew that if the North lost Kentucky, it would lose the Civil War. It was the most productive, most innovative and most progressive state in the South.

Richards' ways of taking the state back to the glory days are covered elsewhere in the news columns, but the big changes in the run-up to the 2008 elections isn't with the candidates; it's with the voters. Since 2000, there's been some growing going on in the electorate.

Except for the die-hards on both sides of the culture wars who won't have anything to do with their lives when the wars peter out, voters are as tired of Jesus freaks as they are of the anything goes crowd. On moral issues, voters seem to have decided that a politician talking about morals is pretty much like a skunk touring a perfume factory.

The majority of voters, too, are tired of living in high gear. They have become more suspicious of quick fixes and the folks who propose them. It has sunk in that a fix installed before there's a clear understanding of the problem probably isn't going to work. Anybody in a hurry to make a law has picked up a dictator virus.

The best example of quick fixes going wrong is in health care. Taking care of the uninsured and limiting damages in suits against doctors is just two peas in a large, rotting pod. Voters expect candidates for leadership to think bigger than that.

Nothing in the last eight years has changed voters more than the Iraqi War. It was preemptive, which rubbed a lot of voters the wrong way. Defended as a war on terrorism, it has done nothing but create more terrorism. Voters are seeing through spin, and they want plain talk from candidates, even if the news is bad. Voters have grabbed the gusto enough times to know that you usually come up empty-handed. And striking while the iron's hot has no meaning, because nobody's a blacksmith.

There is a resurgence of the Peace Movement of 40 years ago. It's reflected in the grassroots push that's boiling outside the limelight for a federal Department of Peace in the President's Cabinet. It would be a counterweight in what many voters feel should be a presence when the Pentagon talks to the State Department. Voters are coming to the realization that you have to work as hard and plan as hard on peace as you do on war.

And no candidate had better depend on that ephemeral thing called star quality. Cute is not enough anymore. The so-called star candidates are going to peak too early, then slide into oblivion.

Star quality might have worked back when the first television debate pitted a Richard Nixon who needed a shave against a clean shaven John F. Kennedy, but not anymore. We know TV and the Internet aren't real life.

And the last president who was able to actually provide jobs was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Those jobs were government jobs and didn't pay all that well. Modern candidates can't plan to feed the greed of the profit-fixated CEO's, because they go to China, Africa, Mexico, etc. as soon as the incentives kick out. Bail-outs are not something voters will applaud.

So what does a candidate do in 2007 and 2008 to woe this more pragmatic and savvy voter? Learn from the turtle.