Just about every night, after our 13-month-old goes to bed, I flip on the television, and inevitably, I wind up watching one of those cable news talk shows that these days are dissecting the presidential primaries.

I'm doing it, though, almost purely for entertainment purposes. Because if I was trying to gather information about the differences among the candidates on matters of policy, or even in their records, I would be wasting my time with the national news media.

Instead, what we're getting on a nightly basis is passionate debate about the style points each candidate is scoring. Clinton's tears. Obama's innocuous observation about the Reagan administration. Romney's religion. Huckabee's guitar skills.

Rarely, if ever, do people discuss the most important question - what would this person do if he or she were elected president.

Ask yourself some basic questions. What are differences between the economic plans of Clinton and Obama, or McCain, Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, etc.? What about their stances on the environment, or tax policy?

There's a good chance you can't answer those questions, and if you keep relying on the nightly news or the cable talk shows, you'll probably never get them answered, either.

And even in this newspaper, the coverage from the national media outlets we rely on to fill our nation/world pages has been pretty weak on issue-specific information.

All of this ranting leads me to my heavily biased conclusion: The best place to learn about the presidential candidates is from the local newspapers covering the candidates where they're actively campaigning.

I have some compelling proof. Check out the Elections 2008 section of our Web site, www.auburnpub.com/elections2008, to see some on-the-ground coverage from the local papers. We had a ton of it from our sister papers in Iowa earlier this month. Now we're getting some great coverage from South Carolina.

The local papers have a totally different approach when candidates are in town. They report on what the candidates are saying to the people in their communities, at that time. They're not speculating on how the message played to a national TV audience.

My hope is that over the next week, we'll get to see some candidates come to New York, now that the state is showing signs of being up-for-grabs. And if they do, we'll get a chance to add to some of that issue-specific coverage.

In the meantime, enjoy the theater you see on the TV each night, but just keep in mind that there are places where you can get what you need in order to make a decision in the voting booth.

Executive editor Jeremy Boyer's columns appear Saturdays in The Citizen and he can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net