THE CAMPAIGNS FOR the March 5 election were winding down to a teeth-grinding frenzy this weekend. I've never, in 20 years of covering local elections, seen this much direct mail, phone calls, and precinct walking. My home phone was ringing all weekend, and every time I answered, I got a recorded messages from somebody praising Mark Leno, Harry Britt, Jeff Adachi, or Kimiko Burton. On Monday, I got a message from Jesse Jackson urging me to vote for Steve Phillips.

At a certain point, this has to be overkill. My stack of direct-mail flyers is more than half an inch tall. I'm a political junkie, and I love this stuff, but I can't even get through it all.

I wonder how the candidates who could only afford one mailing – say, Holli Thier, who was running for state assembly in the race with Britt, Leno, and Phillips – feel. Their messages are totally, completely lost, buried in the huge flood of slick, four-color stuff.

It reminded me of my old fantasy, a simple step to solving all of San Francisco's political problems: just pass a law banning any form of political advertising except 8 1/2-by-11-inch black-and-white photocopied posters stuck on utility poles. That would allow the real freaks to take over the city, since they make the best black-and-white posters.

But alas, my grand plan conflicts with the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, which equates money with speech and essentially says that you can't stop people who have the cash from spending it on political ads.

And somehow, although I have no way of telling at this point (I'm writing this Monday night, March 3), I suspect that the election will really come down to old-fashioned voter turnout. The state assembly races, particularly Britt versus Leno in the 13th District, are going to hinge on which campaign gets its people out to the polls; to a certain extent, the same goes for the public defender's race, Adachi versus Burton. And the folks in the Britt and Adachi camps have proved to be pretty good at that.

If you're reading this after seeing the morning Chronicle headline announcing Britt and Adachi victories, then Willie Brown and John Burton ought to be checking their 401(k) plans and getting ready for retirement. If it doesn't turn out that way ... well, the San Francisco left still has a lot of work to do.