By Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times

In this pivotal election year, fellow citizens, I give you a chilling vision of two Americas.

One America is the swing states, the dozen or so states that don’t fall into the Democratic or Republican camps and will ultimately decide the presidential election. Those unhappy states — they know who they are — are already being flooded with noisy political advertising, day and night.

The other America, the happier America, is what political strategists call “safe states.” In these lucky places, television viewers are mostly safe from being inundated with presidential political harangues.

Election day is almost four months away, but the bombardment has begun in key swing cities such as Columbus, Ohio, and Orlando, Fla., where television stations are already running short of advertising time to sell. One media consulting firm, Borrell Associates, forecasts that political advertising this year will approach $10 billion nationwide, a huge increase from the roughly $7 billion spent in 2008.

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