<table> </table> Decision time is drawing near in the presidential race, so it&#8217;s not surprising to see several political-themed programs arriving this week.</p><p>&#8226;A quadrennial tradition returns with the Linda Ellerbee special &#8220;Kids Pick the President&#8221; (8 tonight, Nickelodeon). Ellerbee, who ought to be given a presidential debate to moderate one of these days, compiled video questions from youngsters across the country, then got the two candidates to sit down and answer them.</p><p>For viewers who have grown tired of attack politics, Ellerbee offers an alternative &#8212; albeit a very brief one that&#8217;s heavily edited for time (21 minutes with commercials). Still, the kids make the candidates answer some surprisingly tough questions, like how they would address the rich-poor divide and global warming.</p><p>The points of view represented here aren&#8217;t your CNN-issue talking heads. One young questioner wants to know how the candidates would deal with illegal immigrants &#8220;without harming their families.&#8221; Then there&#8217;s the boy who wants to know this from both John McCain and Barack Obama: &#8220;Have you ever been picked last?&#8221;</p><p>&#8226;&#8220;The Choice 2008,&#8221; another election tradition, airs as a special two-hour &#8220;Frontline&#8221; at 8 p.m. Tuesday on KCPT and KTWU.</p><p>Perhaps there&#8217;s no better indictment of the ruts that political beat reporters get themselves into than the fact that I, an aficionado of political news, invariably come away from one of these &#8220;Frontline&#8221; productions learning all kinds of things that I never did in hundreds of hours of TV viewing and Web browsing.</p><p>Case in point: A terrific little story from this edition of &#8220;The Choice&#8221; tells of one of the first committee meetings the freshman senator from Illinois attended. It was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and it was to hold confirmation hearings for secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice.</p><p>As the meeting dragged on, the committee&#8217;s chairman launched into one of his signature filibusters, sucking all the oxygen out of the hearing room with his unstoppable rhetoric. Obama thoughtfully scribbled a note on a piece of paper (&#8220;Frontline&#8221; somehow found a photo to perfectly match the moment) and somberly handed it to an aide.</p><p>The note said, &#8220;Shoot. Me. Now.&#8221;</p><p>The yammering committee chairman was Joe Biden.</p><p>&#8226;&#8220;Return of the War Room&#8221; will air at 8 p.m. Monday, Sundance Channel. Remember the documentary &#8220;The War Room,&#8221; about the young turks who strategized Bill Clinton&#8217;s campaign in the 1992 presidential election? Political consultants around the world do. Campaigns from Tony Blair to Nelson Mandela formed their own &#8220;war rooms&#8221; after seeing this documentary, which captured the discipline, acumen and esprit de corps of the Clintonistas as they managed their man to victory against what seemed at times staggering odds.</p><p>The filmmakers behind &#8220;The War Room&#8221; put together this very timely sort-of-sequel to that documentary. The fast-paced follow-up interviews many of the stars of that first film &#8212; George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald, Dee Dee Myers, Ragin&#8217; Cajun James Carville and others &#8212; and to some degree, they spend much of the film reliving the good old days of what they all agree was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.</p><p>What makes &#8220;Return of the War Room&#8221; more than nostalgia, indeed makes it remarkably relevant to this moment, is the way the filmmakers weave in footage from the current campaign and, in the process, show us how similar Obama 2008 is to Clinton 1992. Personal issues dominated both campaigns early on, but eventually gave way to a homestretch focused on issues relating to the faltering economy and a Republican who was unable to run away from the Bush record (in McCain&#8217;s case, Bush 43).