MISSOURI WATCH: ELECTIONS OFFER A POND FULL OF FROGS

When was the last time you went to the polls to vote for a candidate you were convinced was the right choice, whose election would make a difference in government and whose ideals had challenged you to aspire to greater public service? When was the last time it felt good, or even okay, or didn't make your stomach turn, or you didn't have to lie down afterward?

Voting has never been much different from choosing the Valentine King and Queen in the fourth grade, but now that you have been in the voting game for a while, the similarities are neither logical nor amusing.

"The only reason I'm going to vote for Dole is because I can't stand Clinton, Perot and all the rest," one highly intelligent Kansas Citian told me the other day. An outstate lawyer describes the presidential field as "bad, bad and worse"

Turnout for the presidential primaries earlier this year was shamefully low, suggesting many of us have just given up on voting altogether, and exit polls read like a dating history survey in Cosmopolitan magazine. Nearly half of those still brave enough to keep voting wanted a bigger, better pool to choose from. We didn't want to stop dating; we only wanted a better pool from which to choose our mate/leader/president.

But, like dating, there has inevitably been settling. "He seems to be a very decent man," a St. Louis acquaintance said of Dole. "I'm sure he's a good Republican." Discomfiting as this may seem, we might give more consideration to candidates if they offered more than allegiance to a political party.

Far too many voters have become hard and cynical. In the past some candidates have been old enough to be our grandfather or resembled a patrician sugar daddy that we cruelly mocked to his face, then on to a sweet-talking pretty boy who had the faint air of Elvis about him. We knew Bill Clinton was a seducer when we elected him, so we're being grown-up about his thousand and one betrayals. We don't even seem to care about those ugly warts in his past, although every time we hear a new one we grow a bit more cynical and a bit less inclined to trust our 200-year-old political system.

What's fun for those who write about it is to watch Democrats and Republicans respond to news of their respective candidates. Each time some new disclosure about Bill or Hillary hits the papers, Democrats hold their breath before determining its severity. By now they have become experts in self-control as the latest scandal details are unfurled for the world to read and ponder. Assessing each misdemeanor, Democrats pass judgment not on the turpitude of their candidate but on how damaging the details are to the nominee's chance for another four years in the White House. Even the time-tried-and-tested Democrats always suspected Bill was a feckless hillbilly.

The Republicans are almost as much fun to watch, although their misery is fresher and thus more poignant. Behind in the polls after being rejected at least 49.9 percent of the time in the GOP primaries, Dole is coming across not as a war hero but as a relic of a conflict that a diminishing number of Americans even remember. World War II is still a big deal to my generation but to those who have since lived through Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Beirut, Desert Storm, Haiti and now Bosnia, the details get lost and the importance unrealized and even unimagined. It's hard to get credit for being in a conflict that many do not remember or revere. Good Republicans, like their Democratic counterparts, hold their breath every time this distinguished ex-senator abandons his long-time battle against budget deficits by trying to out-promise his opponent. Imagine Barry Goldwater trying to match the golden path promised by LBJ back in 1964. Barry wasn't a man to compromise ideals.

We seem to be keeping Clinton and Dole around until someone slightly better -- or slightly worse but newer -- comes along. That's because we are an electorate that has been around the block a couple of times and we don't let ourselves fall for just anyone anymore. Oh, a few of us had a weekend fling with Ross Perot, finding him somewhat interesting if only because he was the only suitor we had known who could not only pay for a good meal but buy the restaurant if he had a hankering. But we want to really like our candidates, not roll our eyes when they talk about the CIA at their daughter's wedding.

Americans no longer fall all over themselves to embrace leaders. We simply take up with new ones as an excuse to dump the old ones.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of the Missouri News and Editorial Service.