MISSOURI WATCH: TIN EARS AND OTHER CAMPAIGN SINS

There is a delightful scene in Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal . Husband" that goes: .

Lord Caversham: "Do you always really understand what you say, sir?"

Lord Goring: "Yes, father, if I listen attentively."

If Wilde were around to observe life in America in 1996, he would probably modernize the dialogue, but since he has long departed, let me offer a revision:

Modern Candidate: "Do you always really understand what I am saying?"

Modern Voter: "You are really saying what you think I want to hear, whether I listen attentively or not."

With the season for political coronations now thankfully behind us, we voters will spend the next two months being romanced by candidates from neighborhood wards all the way to the White House. Without glancing at the script, most of us could write 90 percent of the political dialogue we will be hearing daily until the wee small hours of November 5.

The reason we have such remarkable recall is not because we have set to memory the unremarkable phrases that candidates use, like crutches, to participate in the political dialogue, but because the words have been used for decades, even centuries, and have thus become so trite, meaningless and vacuous that even those with only the ability of pre-kindergarten vocabularies could recite them.

Political dialogue is no longer classified as meaningful or useless because so little of it has the quality of the former and because the latter, whether we choose to believe it or not, is all we have. If the dialogue is meaningless and if its abuse has made it of no value, then why do we have campaigns at all? Good question and you may now proceed to the head of the class.

We have campaigns because we have devised no other means of separating the wheat from the chaff. Because of this inability, we are almost always left with only the chaff and only an occasional grain of wheat. Take the current presidential campaign as but one example, however sufficient it is to make the point. Whether Democrat or Republican, the reality is that regardless of the homage you are willing to pay to Bill Clinton or Bob Dole, you realize that neither one would be your first choice for the most important job in America. Democrats have been muttering for four years on the need for a better leader, while Republicans ultimately settled on Dole, despite his several liabilities, because there was no obvious first choice.

Glance at the rosters of both parties in this fall's Missouri campaign and determine for yourself how many, or how few, candidates would normally be your first choice for the offices being filled. Some of the candidates are of such mediocre stock that they are well known because of their failures rather than their accomplishments.

What does all this say about what we parochially call the world's greatest democracy? For starters, it says the system we have perpetuated to choose our leaders has long ago started sputtering on God only knows how many fewer cylinders. It says that our selection system in the electronic age is like trying to deliver a space shuttle on a horse-drawn wagon. You might get there but the performance is hardly reassuring or efficient.

Today we have campaigns dedicated to obfuscating the issues and hiding the facts. In their stead we have devised techniques of slander and libel to expose the foibles not only of the opposition but, accidentally, to reveal the empty core of all parties. The candidates speak, but the words fall on ears that have long since turned deaf from abusive decibels.

The poster boy of the collapsed campaign system is that basically decent man, George (Read-My-Lips) Bush, who was excoriated by voters for his broken no-new-taxes pledge, while his opponent was making promises that apparently were never meant to be kept. In this campaign, both men are now promising to cut taxes, apparently ignoring the priority of the vast majority of voters to stanch the huge budget-deficit numbers.

Revising Wilde to make the point above, this dialogue seems fitting:

Modern Voters: "Do you candidates always really understand what we are saying about ending budget deficits?"

Modern Candidates: "Indeed we do, but first, let us tell you what we think you really want to hear."

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