THE CONSULTANTS HAVE TURNED POLITICS INTO A BAD JOKE

STANFORD, California -- The United States used to be a serious
country. It was inhabited by engaged citizens and governed by
authentic leaders who talked about weighty issues. But the current
American political spectacle amounts to a decidedly unfunny bad joke.

First we had a presidential sex scandal, a yearlong opera bouffe that
paralyzed the entire political establishment, preoccupied the media
and culminated in a full-dress impeachment proceeding that called into
question our national reputation for common sense.

Now the obsession with a candidate's alleged substance abuse a
quarter-century ago threatens to distract us from matters of real
substance in the here and now. We are poised once again to plunge into
the goofy and politically irrelevant realm of salacious titillations
and youthful peccadilloes.

A version of Gresham's law (bad money drives out good) is corrupting
American dernocracy Foolishness is relentlessly driving out
seriousness. Small wonder that disillusionment with politics runs so
deep.

Not long ago we used to have a different kind of politics.

We used to ask not what a candidate had done to his body but what he
could do for the country.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's dissembling about his paraplegia,
even his dalliance with Lucy Mercer, weighed nothing when put in the
scales with his struggles against the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler.

Whether Dwight Eisenhower had an affair with his wartime driver, Kay
Summersby, counted for infinitely less than his ability to lead the
Allies to victory in Europe as supreme Allied commander and to end the
war in Korea as president.

John F. Kennedy might or might not have smoked dope in the White House
and bedded Marilyn Monroe, but what really mattered was whether he was
levelheaded , enough to handle the Cuban missile crisis and how deep
his commitment was to the cause of civil rights.

To be sure, fascination with the supposedly lurid private lives of
public figures has always been part of our political culture, from
allegations about Thomas Jefferson's assignations with Sally Hemmings
to charges that John Quincy Adams was a pimp and Andrew Jackson a
bigamist, to whispering campaigns about the drunkenness of Andrew
- -Johnson, the philandering of Grover Cleveland, Warren G. Harding,
Eisenhower, Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and innuendos about
Richard Nixon's psychoses and Ronald . Reagan's amnesia.

But alongside all that scandal-mongering there also thrived a robust
engagement with the great public issues of the day: slavery, states'
rights, Reconstruction, the New Deal, World War II, the war against
poverty, civil rights, the Cold War, the proper role of government.

Now it seems that topics like these have dropped out of our civic
discourse, leaving only our prurient interests to fill the space once
occupied by a common concern with the public interest.

The future of education and work, the fate of the environment,
relations with Russia, China and Latin America, campaign finance
reform, trade policy, universal medical care -- all go undebated while
the Sabbath gasbags and other pundits niggle over a 30-year-old line
of coke.

How did this happen?

The conventional wisdom blames the media, which in the post-Watergate
era have developed a professional ethos that ranks the expose as the
highest form of the journalist's art. Some commentators cite the
corrosive effects of popular culture, which has bred an apparently
insatiable appetite for the sensational.

Others point to the aggressively anti-government rhetoric of the
Reagan-Bush era, which spawned pervasive disenchantment with public
affairs, and still others to the. giddy prosperity of the last decade,
which has nurtured a ferociously acquisitive individualism and
unhinged an entire generation from any sense of common purpose.

All these developments have played a role. But the real culprits are
elsewhere.

Much of the blame for the sorry state of our civic culture can be laid
at the door of the "political consultants" who have risen to
prominence in the last few decades.

The consultants brandish poll results and parse focusgroup survey
data, and politicians are then cowed into silence on potentially
divisive issues to avoid alienating any possible constituency.

Political debate has been reduced to pablum, and aspiring leaders have
been robbed of authenticity, once the most valuable of political assets.

Genuine argument has been banished from the public square,
impoverishing us all, and deepening the already widespread conviction
that politics is the realm of the venal and irrelevant.

Governor George W. Bush's nascent presidential campaign provides a
case in point. Presumably advised by sophisticated handlers, he has
until recently refused to say anything concrete and meaningful about a
single public issue. Small wonder, then, that all attention focused on
his private life.

What else was he offering to a public that needs and deserves ,to know
more about him? What right has he to complain about media attacks on
his character when vague claims about character are virtually the only
qualifications for the presidency that he saw fit to cite?

In an earlier era, when political consultancy was still a mercifully
amateurish affair, public figures defined themselves differently, even
at the risk of giving offense. Truly effective leaders were not afraid
to divide the house on questions they deemed important.

Franklin Roosevelt, whose very political identity consisted in his
stand on the issues; not in idle speculation about the possible flaws
of his character, declared in 1936 that his opponents were "unanimous
in their hatred of me, and I welcome their hatred."

He stood squarely on the New Deal program of Social Security,
financial market regulation and labor reform, and eventually on the
necessity for intervention in World War II -all highly controversial
positions that irritated and even outraged some voters and won
election to the presidency no fewer than four times.

After that, Harry Truman pugnaciously lambasted the "do-nothing"
Republican 80th Congress, split his own party with his embrace of
civil rights, and scored an upset victory over the heavily favored
Thomas E. Dewey.

At the risk of dismantling the "solid" Democratic stronghold in the
South, Lyndon Johnson took up the cause of African-Americans and won
the presidency in 1964 by the greatest margin of any candidate in U.S.
history.

Ronald Reagan threw down the gauntlet to an entrenched liberal
establishment that had dominated American life for nearly half a
century and wrought a conservative revolution in American politics.

History counts all these men, Roosevelt especially, among the
century's greatest political leaders. Not incidentally, none of them
drew any conspicuous attention to his private life while running for
office or while in the White House, a demonstration that Gresham's law
works in reverse, too. Good, honest, authentic politics leaves little
room for the trivial gossip that so dominates our era.

Governor Bush should take this point. He spoke on defense matters the
other day. He should keep talking about something real, give voters a
sense of his authentic, unpackaged self, and questions about his
pharmacological history will be certain to go away. He might even win
the election.

It might be objected that such an analysis proceeds from the
vulnerable assumption that the past was somehow finer and higher-toned
than the frivolous present - the classic reverie of old geezers.

But while it might be a law of history that one generation's political
philosophy becomes another generation's political joke, can that law
hold when one generation's politics is a joke in the first place?

Get serious.

The writer, a professor of history at Stanford University, is author of
"Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. "
He contributed this comment to the Los Angeles Times.