WASHINGTON -- As the critical campaign for control of Congress ends, there has been a striking similarity from state to state in the basic strategy that each national party conceived.

Nearly everywhere, Democratic candidates have charged their Republican opponents with seeking to "privatize" Social Security by calling on would-be retirees under the federal entitlement program to "risk their money in the stock market."

At the same time, nearly everywhere, Republican nominees have alleged that their Democratic foes are soft on terrorism by refusing to vote approval of President Bush's plan to create a new Department of Homeland Security.

Both arguments have been intentional distortions as part of a bitter campaign of negativism, especially in television and radio commercials, that has been a match for any in the recent past.

Many Democratic candidates and their ads have made it sound as if their Republican rivals want to take all or most of each taxpayer's payroll deductions for Social Security in a fool's quest for bigger returns that will threaten the dependability of the federal retirement program for senior citizens.

In fact, most Republicans who have not been scared off the plan advocate the voluntary shifting of only a very small percentage of payroll taxes into what the GOP prefers to call "personal" or "individual" investment accounts.

But in the last year, the Democrats have been so effective in spooking seniors by pointing to the stock market slide that a Republican pollster, in a widely circulated (by Democrats) memo, warned GOP candidates never to use the word "privatization" in advocating any changes in the Social Security system.

Wary Republican candidates by and large have taken the advice, either abandoning all talk about Social Security reform or coming up with approaches to seniors' retirement that have nothing to do with payroll tax deductions.

The same basic scare/smear tactic has been used by the Republicans in pointing to the Democratic refusal to swallow Mr. Bush's plan to create a Cabinet-level agency for homeland defense.

With so many Democrats up for re-election having voted for the president's resolution authorizing pre-emptive war against Iraq, the Republicans have not been able to charge their opponents directly with a lack of patriotism. So the homeland security issue has been used indirectly as a proxy for the same allegation.

An exception was in the Minnesota senatorial race, in which the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, who voted against the Bush resolution, was a potential target on those grounds but actually solidified his support in the polls by sticking to his guns.

When Mr. Wellstone's death in a plane crash brought former Vice President Walter Mondale into the race in his place, Mr. Mondale promptly said he also would have opposed the Bush resolution had he been in the Senate. Amid a wave of sympathy after the Wellstone tragedy, Mr. Mondale's Republican opponent, former St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, found it difficult to attack this icon of Minnesota politics aggressively on any grounds.

Republican candidates in most of the other states I visited this fall have charged that the Democrats, as captives of organized labor, have opposed the creation of the new agency because unions representing government employees are putting their interests ahead of Mr. Bush's need for flexibility in pulling together workers from various agencies.

The Democrats, led by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, have insisted that the president already has all the flexibility he needs without imperiling government workers' hard-won job security and employee rights.

And so, when the nation is facing the momentous prospect of going to war if diplomacy fails to achieve disarmament in Iraq, the issue that should have been dominant in this fall's elections has been lost in negative distortions on lesser matters, bringing more heat than light to a critical campaign.

Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau. His column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.