Fortunately for me we are hitting daylight-saving time this weekend. Otherwise I would be even further behind schedule than I normally am.

And while there are obvious advantages to setting our clocks back one hour — such as arriving at our church on time for once or waking up and getting the kids on the bus on time for a week — there are several other advantages often overlooked.

For example, this one extra hour gives political bigwigs more time to call me and ask for my vote. So far (if you're keeping score at home) Tom Ridge, Lynn Swann, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Franco Harris have called urging me to vote for their particular candidate.

With this newfound hour, I'm hoping to hear from other celebrities begging for my vote. You know the ones I'm talking about. I want to hear from well-informed celebrities like Homer Simpson, Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Simpson. Heck, my kids would love it if Dora the Explorer and Clifford the talking dog called, too.

This extra hour also gives me a chance to catch up on all the reading I have to do. Again, this is a direct result of the pending election.

To date, I have a stack of fliers and brochures touting the virtue of each candidate, or worse, explaining all of the horrible things their opponent has done in the past 32 minutes. I'm sure it's important reading, and I've been telling my kids they should read for a half-hour each day. I think sorting them by "love" or "hate" makes the most sense, as the "hate" stack is noticeably larger.

Since my stack of political advertisements rivals a copy of "War and Peace," I have several hours ahead of me that maybe daylight-saving time can't even fix.

As I think about it more, perhaps the whole daylight- saving time issue is politically motivated.

I can hear the discussions now. Behind closed doors and on the agenda right after secret pay raises, illegal campaign contributions and lunch is daylight-saving time. The discussions likely focused on elected officials being able to generate more campaign time, more paper to read or use as a coaster on an end table and more robo-dialing. In fact, the only argument among officials probably centered on making daylight-saving time three hours longer instead of one.

In the end, however, all of the officials agree that "yes," daylight-saving time is indeed imperative to their political ¿ er, nation's, continued success.

From an economic point of view, consider the fact that advertising printers would work one hour longer, perhaps generating overtime pay, and the U.S. Postal Service would log an extra hour of miles for a couple of days.

Heck, if we instituted daylight-saving time once a month, we could probably pay off the national debt before the end of next year and we wouldn't even need to rescue (a.k.a. bail out) the banks or other troubled companies.

With so much extra energy flowing through my veins, I could probably write an extra article.

OK, maybe not.

For some reason, the word deadline is able to move accordingly, regardless of my personal time frame or the time on the clock. It knows no limits, in fact.

So embrace this extra hour and read more political junk mail while answering another robo-call from an unknown number. (I love caller ID.) This day only comes around once per year until all of the politicians catch on to this trend.

Don't worry. Common sense isn't something many of them have, so we're safe for a while.

Christian Ola approved of this column. He can be reached at christianola@aol.com and through his Web site, www.christianola.com.