Put out more flags. That has been the perennial refrain of campaign managers, though the stars and stripes came late to American politics. It was not until 1889 that it was even flown over the White House, at the behest of the last civil war general to become president, one Benjamin Harrison. It only slowly caught on as a badge of true "Americanism".
In the competition for excess, it is also necessary for a candidate's handlers to denude every dime store within a hundred miles of its stock of red, white and blue balloons. Thus accoutred, it is all right to parade naked of ideas or principle.
But the politics of the flag are trickier this year and, for a change, revealing. The question is, which flag? Down in South Carolina, where they started the civil war by firing on the federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in April 1861, one of the big flags fluttering above the statehouse dome in the warm breezes of Columbia is 13 stars on a blue cross.
It is the battle flag of the army of the Confederacy. Did someone forget to take it down when they lost? No, this piece of history goes back only to the 1960s. They put up the Confederate flag then with the official explanation that they were marking the centennial of the civil war.
There is certainly a legitimate pride in the heroism of the boys in grey, but in the 1960s it just happens that South Carolina was in the forefront of the battle to preserve the ugliest aspect of Dixie: its maintenance of slavery by "Jim Crow" laws of segregation. By lynching and dispossession, blacks were denied the vote, decent schooling and healthcare, and altogether went in fear of their lives. What South Carolina ran up the flagpole in the early 1960s was the jolly roger of apartheid. It remains the only state not to recognize Martin Luther King's birthday as a state holiday.
Controversy about the flag rumbled for years. No other southern state flew the Confederate colours over its capitol. This year the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has forced the issue on to the presidential election agenda by calling for an economic boycott of South Carolina. It is a shrewd weapon against a state that earns more than $6bn from tourism, including an estimated $300m from black visitors. More importantly, it has brought the Republican "Southern" strategy into the open to the dismay of the frontrunners George W Bush and John McCain.
The strategy was concocted, of course, by George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama, who recognized in 1964 and 1968 that Republicans could break the Democratic hold on the solid South by appealing to the anti-black sentiments of white working and middle-class men and women. Wallace's attacks on Washington's "pointy-headed bureaucrats" were easily read as rejections of the civil rights laws.
Bush has been campaigning as an inclusive candidate; he is at pains to speak Spanish to the Latinos. McCain has been making much of his virtue as a straight-shooter who does not waffle like other politicians. But both men, faced with the Confederate flag, have laid down their principles with alacrity. Bush says simply that people should "butt out" of an issue which only concerns South Carolinians. It is what they said in Charleston in 1861.
McCain's first impulse was to condemn the flag as "a symbol of racism and slavery", then he thought the better of his candour. He made a written statement. The text announced there were two sides to the question. "Some" saw the flag as a symbol of slavery, others as a symbol of heritage. "Personally," he concluded, "I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage." What matters, of course, is not the perception of the ambitious senator from Arizona but that of the 30% of the state's population who have a humiliating daily reminder of slavery and segregation. Fifty thousand of them vented their feelings in a protest march.
It is a pathetic display from two pretenders to leadership. There is, however, someone with more candour: the flag-raiser-in-chief, Arthur Ravenel, who put the matter bluntly. A state senator and former Republican candidate for governor, Mr Ravenel opined at a pro-flag rally that the NAACP was the National Association for Retarded People. Later, he said it was a slip of the tongue, then apologised - not to the NAACP but to retarded people. Pressed to disassociate himself, Bush has called the comments "unfortunate" but refused to say whether he thought Ravenel should apologise.
South Carolina's February 19 primary is critical, coming after Iowa's caucuses and New Hampshire's primary and before the March 7 cluster of caucuses and primaries which include New York and California. South Carolina is a key one for McCain who hopes to derail Bush's triumphal progression by winning support from the state's 400,000 veterans.
But what is there to choose between two white flags?