Both major political parties have selected their standard bearers. Barack Obama and Joe Biden represent the Democrats. John McCain and Sarah Palin represent the Republicans.

Today we are sending out a newsletter where we ask the recipients if it will make any difference to the hobby which presidential candidate wins in November.

Columnist David Ganz reports that though both candidates have supported numismatic legislation from time to time, neither one seems to have any significant record one way or the other on hobby-related matters.

Naturally collectors pay attention to who will become the Treasury secretary because it is his facsimile signature on American Federal Reserve Notes. There will be a new Treasurer of the United States as well, who signs to the left of the Treasury secretary.

Both will change no matter who wins and that virtually guarantees a new Series date of 2009 for notes.

A new Mint director is in the cards. The position is one of the political plums that are handed out to a supporter of whoever is President rather than a party loyalist, so even if the political party does not change at the head of government in November, the person in the chair likely will.

All of these changes are interesting to those of us down at the collecting level, but there are other more important questions. Will we get more new coins or fewer? Will the value of the dollar go up or down on foreign exchange markets? How will that affect gold and other precious metals? I am sure you can think of others and will be paying attention to the campaign over the next two months.

I am in a statistical frame of mind this week. Yesterday it was state quarters. Today I have the mintage figures for the Presidential dollars before me.

Collectors believe you need to abolish the paper $1 bill to get anybody to use dollar coins. Until then, old habits and loyalties dominate usage patterns.

These old habits dictate a death spiral for the Presidential dollar, though the Mint has just launched a four-city effort to avert this. Will it be enough?

Well on the one hand, the statistics do not yet show that rigor mortis has set in for the Presidential dollar. Mintage numbers are still significant but they do point straight down. Each succeeding design has a lower mintage than the one before it.

Washington sits with a 340,360,000 combined total from Denver and Philadelphia.

Adams follows with 224,560,000. Thomas Jefferson sits at 203,610,000 and Madison is at 172,340,000.

That makes the 2007 first-year total approximately 941 million.

This year the Monroe dollar total is 124,490,000 while the John Quincy Adams is 115,260,000.

If the pattern holds, Andrew Jackson will be lower still. That decline will suit American Indian tribes who are complaining that Jackson should not even be honored at all because of his policies toward Native Americans. There will be a few more Presidents against which this issue can be raised as a reason not to use the coins.

Other than the paid optimism of those executing Mint strategy, it is hard to see success at the end of this effort.

Everybody is worrying about the economy. It is so pervasive that it has become as ubiquitous as the weather.

What if the economy doesn’t slow down anymore from where it currently is?

Looking at some state quarter mintages might give us a clue.

Mintages have actually begun to rise again. The bottom seems to have been reached with the first state quarter design early this year. The Oklahoma quarter had a combined Philadelphia and Denver mintage of 416,600,000.

The next design of 2008, the New Mexico piece, rose to 488,600,000 pieces. The third design, the Arizona quarter, rose more, to 509,600,000. This total inched just ahead of the Utah mintage at the end of 2007.

Coin demand follows the economy. The Mint strikes coins to fill that demand. The mintage of quarters has gone up.

Does this mean the economy has reached a turning point this year? Could be.

The quarter is the workhorse denomination of the economy. It actually serves a purpose beyond simply making change from a larger sum. People pump them into vending machines and there are other uses for them, but the vending machine is something I am confronted with every time I pass through the company’s main break room to get my mail.

If the economy is indeed in the process of turning around, it will have ramifications for the value of the dollar, precious metals and collector coins. Let’s keep watching.

With demand for the one-ounce silver and gold American Eagles running so heavy, it is probably a good idea to pause and look at the numbers sold so far in 2008 as supplied by the U.S. Mint.

The silver American Eagle has passed through the 12-million mark at 12,125,000 here near the end of August. The Mint is ramping up to produce nearly two million a month more. That would put total sales over 20 million pieces, which would be nearly double any top total from prior years. Will the Mint hit that total? It all depends on its privately produced supply of blanks.

Naturally, because gold is more valuable, the totals for one-ounce gold American Eagles is lower. It is currently 307,500, but here too production is being ramped up. So far in August, the total produced is 80,000 pieces.

Even maintaining that pace would still bring the annual total to hardly more than 600,000 pieces. Here, too, the supply of blanks is a critical factor.

That would be a reasonably high number compared to most past years, but in 1986, 1987, 1998 and 1999 the annual total was well over 1 million, with the 1999 holding the top production spot of 1.5 million. Remember Y2K demand?

Production for gold fractional Eagles is much lower, but then so is demand. The Mint says it has a supply on hand, unlike the situation for the one-ounce coin.

Half-ounce total is 20,000, quarter ounce is 24,000 and tenth ounce is 95,000.

Buffalo one-ounce coin production stands at 109,500 pieces so far this year. Supply here has so far been adequate.

With platinum, numbers are really tiny, but that has been true in past years as well.

The one-ounce Eagle stands at 1,200, the half ounce at 2,200, the quarter ounce at 4,400 and the tenth ounce at 5,000.

Now let’s see what happens over the next four months.

What a difference a year makes. Today the First Spouse gold coins for Andrew Jackson will become available to collectors.

I imagine the commencement of sales at noon Eastern time today on the Mint Web site will cause very little fuss or bother. How unlike the case when the Thomas Jefferson was offered a year ago.

Jefferson happened to be the third and last First Spouse gold coins to sellout quickly. In fact, they were the last First Spouse coins to sell out at all.

Once the novelty wears off, so does buyer interest apparently. Does this mean the Mint is offering the numismatic equivalent of the hoola hoop? Hot one minute and then forever on the margin, fondly recalled by those who remember the fad?

Could be.

Legislation for the National Parks quarter series includes provisions to make versions of the designs in five-ounce sizes three inches in diameter. Colin Bruce of the Standard Catalog of World Coins staff called these large “coins” hockey pucks many years ago.

Another piece of legislation calling for civil rights quarters has exactly the same provision for a three-inch, five-ounce silver version. How much further can the U.S. Mint take novelty in numismatics?

I am sure we will eventually find out, but we collectors may not like the answer.

Perhaps there will even be a U.S. coin for the hoola hoop. How about that?

When you ask a stupid question, you know what happens.

When Numismatic News went to press with the Aug. 26 issue, it featured a story on Page 4 about protesters in Denver hoping to levitate the Denver Mint during the last week of August.

I thought it was funny. I thought it a good idea to ask in our weekly poll question whether the protesters would levitate the mint.

Well, 36 percent said yes.

That might worry me if I thought the repondents were serious. I am assuming they thought the topic was just as silly as I did and were giving me as much of a silly answer as I was asking a silly question.

The written responses that followed up in the Sept. 2 issue were sparse. Usually we get so many answers we cannot run them all in the space we have. That was not the case with this poll question.

Just in case you missed the news, the protesters did not succeed in levitating the mint.

If my theory on this poll question is incorrect, then we are all in trouble.

No, the fight isn’t always about how to spend money, but about what the nature of money itself is. That historical idea came to mind when I was at the American Numismatic Association convention. I talked to all sorts of people about all sorts of topics.

One fellow I have known for years wanted to talk about the gold standard. He almost seemed to want to fight about it. He declared paper money was unconstitutional. He cited what he said was the constitutional language that says only gold and silver are legal tender.

I couldn’t resist pointing out to him that the Supreme Court said that paper money was legal in 1870. That court case was a whopper. It was also historically interesting for people who like to know the rest of the story.

The founder of the modern American system of paper money was Salmon P. Chase. He was the Treasury secretary for Abraham Lincoln and the North. He was desperate for money. Like the South, he was forced to issue unbacked paper money called Demand Notes to finance the war.

Chase was nothing if not creative. Not only did he issue Demand Notes, but he figured out a new way of war financing that ran circles around anything ever done by the United States before. He created the National Banking System. Chartered national banks could issue their own paper money, but it had to be backed by federal government bonds. What were these bonds? Why they were debt to finance the war.

The new system worked. The North got the money. The North won the war. But in the meantime, Chase was appointed Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. During the Grant administration, a imminent court ruling could declare what Chase had done constitutional or unconstitutional.

Perhaps oddly, Chase was on the side of calling it unconstitutional. Grant leaned the other way. A vacancy on the court was filled with a “sound” paper money man and the decision went 5-4 in favor of paper.

We’ve had it ever since and we’ve been fighting about it ever since as the booth visitor demonstrates.