I mentioned that there was no mention of the war on terror during Thursday night’s Democratic debate.

Maybe this latest round of arrests will shut down whatever terror cells are operating in the U.K., and within two weeks, we’re all talking about some other issue. Maybe American news audiences have terrorism burnout; I noted this weekend that while Fox News Channel was using a lot of coverage from their UK-based sister channel, Sky News, CNN and MSNBC were less wall-to-wall with their coverage of the would-be-car-bomber at Glasgow Airport, etc.

But just as one high-profile lunatic shooting spree usually triggers two or three copycats in the following days, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if there were additional incidents in the coming weeks. And it seems likely that every unattended suitcase, backpack, etc. will cause false alarms on this side of the Atlantic.

Does terrorism overseas have a significant political impact at home? I know one political consultant who thinks the Beslan school shootings had a huge impact on the 2004 election, as did the bin Laden tape (lots more on this here)… on the other hand, the arrests relating to the effort to bomb planes at Heathrow last August didn’t seem to much of an impact on the news environment before last year’s election.

One car bomb in an American city, however, and the political scene would look dramatically different overnight…