EVERYTHING CHANGES IN TODAY'S WORLD EXCEPT POLITICAL SYSTEM

Sunday was Great Debate Day. America's political eyes focused on St. Louis. From the hustings, the pundits poured into town exchanging impressions, innuendoes, predictions, rumors and occasionally even a fact or two, if time allowed.

The commentators are reconciled to the ultimate truth of 1992. When the nationwide polls taken in the past few days are averaged, Bill Clinton maintains a steady 12 point lead over President Bush. Since Labor Day, Bush has campaigned himself nowhere. Secondhand Ross is talking himself down to someplace between negligible and irrelevant. The debates are now the final ritual Bush praying for a miracle knockout punch and Clinton needing only to rope-a-dope around to a draw.

As the world radically changes in about every major respect, the essence of the American political process stumbles along unscathed. We are witnessing yet another quadrennial spectacle of exhausted candidates recycling year-old comments to present to an equally exhausted electorate. The only difference between 1988's campaign rhetoric and this year's model is the emergence of Larry King as America's preferred venue.

We recognize that our educational system has to be recast not simply to prepare some bodies to perform skilled labor, but to deliver brains to perform jobs requiring complex skills in an increasingly competitive world. Yet in politics, it's business as usual.

We recognize that our health care system requires fundamental revision. We do not know how economically to deliver the benefits of our sophisticated medical knowledge to all our citizens nor do we know how to pay and care for increasing numbers of frail elderly whose bodies function while their mental faculties become impaired. Reform must come. Yet, we foresee no alteration of the governmental system through which we create substantive change.

We recognize that the economic future is in intense global competition between the European Community, the Asian Rim and the North American continent. This will produce the greatest economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Yet the American political process remains frozen.

In the 21st century, very little will be static. To be sure, there will be the eternal verities, but with rapid and ever-changing applications. In a constantly changing world, the only certainty seems to be the immutable nature of politics in America. Substance, it is argued, transcends the squabbles of green-eyed shade types arguing about procedure. But in America, we can't address the substantive problems of a modern society unless we face up to the outmoded features of our existing political process.

We know the symptoms: the incomprehensible presidential primary system; the numbingly long political campaign season; the stultifying power of campaign money; degrading negative TV commercials and more. We curse the symptoms each election; we curse them now.

If President Bush, Governor Clinton and Mr. Perot can agree on little else in Sunday's debate, perhaps they could agree that the agonies, indignities and irrelevancies of the American campaign process should not be emulated. Let's hope that our present curses become prayers of political deliverance.