Adele M. Stan is a regular contributor to IntellectualCapital.com. She is the Washington correspondent for Working Woman magazine.

It was an odd dream from which I awoke this morning. I stood at the teacher's desk in a classroom empty but for the one student who lingered at my side as I packed up to go home. It wasn't that the chairs in the classroom were unoccupied, for there were no chairs.

A lone soul made his way down the hall, peered in my doorway and, recognizing me, said hello. It was Patrick J. Buchanan, dressed in the clothes of a teacher -- the blue shirt, khaki pants and canvas windbreaker often worn by my friend Michael, a schoolteacher in real life. We hadn't seen each other in a while, Pat and I, and so it was with affection and sadness that I kissed him on both cheeks, the way one greets the foreign-born when traveling in the international circles of Washington, D.C. He looked thin and weary, a ghost of his once-robust self, but he seemed happy to see me. Then he ambled back down the lonely corridor whereupon, on the eve of the 2000 presidential election, I awoke in our nation's capital wondering what the hell that was all about.

A great team

Back in the '96 campaign, we had been a great team, Pat and I, though I doubt he saw it that way. Throughout Iowa and New Hampshire, I dogged him, recording his pontifications and trying to goad him into saying something outrageous (which didn't take much effort). His comments, his speeches, the grand sweep of the issues on which he spoke all added up to fodder for one civics lesson after the next. He may have come down on the wrong side of every issue he touched, but he dared to touch all the big ones: immigration, abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, states' rights, the new economy, the Supreme Court, the role of religion in the public square. If you were a journalist wanting more than a horse race, the Buchanan campaign was a dream beat.

And then there was the oratory. Oh, yes, dear reader, it [ITAL]was[END ITAL] good for me. Those snappy speeches steeped in vitriol and alliteration! Hang with Buchanan long enough, and you start writing like him. And that's not a bad thing, my friends. Take a Buchanan quote, any Buchanan quote -- say, "We're fighting a cultural war, a war for the soul of America"-- and you've got the jumping off point for a discourse on the strife within the Republican Party or a theological tract on the American soul. And the guy's winning primaries.. So, yeah, you've got a horse race, but one that lets you write about things that matter.

That was then...

But this is now, the new millennium, and by virtue of his flight from the G.O.P., Patrick J. is barely a factor in the national discourse, even with the $12 million he wrangled out of the Federal Election Commission after bullying his way to the Reform Party nomination.

The front-loaded primary schedule we endured earlier this year ensured that no challengers to the parties' anointed presidential candidates could really have a shot at altering the political discourse, had there been one. There wasn't. Most of us bought into the non-discursive approach -- the politicians, the pollsters, themedia and We the People.

This one was an issueless campaign, we've been told, the first in modern memory. And given our choices, we've been content to believe that. Neither candidate can make a decent speech, so do we really want to listen to them wrestle with the big questions?

Never mind

Never mind that the when the next president chooses as many as three Supreme Court justices he could choose people who find no right to privacy in the Constitution of the United States. You see, the framers never guaranteed explicit privacy rights. Whatever protection we have depends on the high court, a condition that could change with the wind. Not an issue. (Remember that when your medical records are posted on the Web.)

Abortion? We're sick of that fight. Not an issue. Gay rights? Those people have a prime-time situation comedy now. Isn't that enough?

Nevermind that the economy has mutated completely over the past 10 years, rendering workplace protections of the industrial economy, shrinking what's left of the old safety net -- unemployment insurance, pension plans, employer-provided health insurance -- to a shred of tulle. Not an issue.

Thanks to the magic of digitized globalization, we're all working so many hours these days that we haven't got time to pick up our heads and ask the presidential candidates, hey, do you think it's a good thing that we work all the time? Can anything be done about this?

A recent survey by the Center for Policy Alternatives found that both men and women ranked "declining moral values" near the top of their list of concerns. When asked, "Which of the following do you think would do the most to strengthen values in our society?" a plurality said, "Parents spending more time with children." Not "less sex and violence in the media." Not "more religion." Somehow, though time may be of the essence, it's not a campaign issue.

With so many of us working -- all the time -- as independent contractors or running our own businesses or employees of the new dot-com sector, we can't afford to notice the wobbles in the new economy. But what happens if a wobble becomes a big dip and all of those self-employed people who look to be middle class are suddenly without employment? No unemployment insurance for them! And who will paytheir mortgages, their credit card debt? What happens then to the new economy?

Ah, but who cares? Not Al. Not Dubya. Not you. Not me. I just want to know what size my tax cut will be.

Don't worry about the kids, they'll be fine. Kids are resilient; they'll get over having rarely seen their parents over the course of their upbringing. Just make sure Grandma has a prescription drug plan.

The Seinfeld election

It shouldn't have been my job to spend the last year whining about the sad state of American politics. On the brink of the new millennium, with the whole world having changed in a heartbeat, it should have been my job to report on the vision laid out by the presidential candidates and perhaps speculate on what the founders would have made of our current situation. In a big election year, journalists should serve as continuing ed teachers, chronicling the national journey. But if we're to do that, we need more to write about than a horse race. We need candidates with convictions they're not afraid to share, politicians who can paint us a picture of the world they want to live in.

In 1996, Patrick J. Buchanan made us fulfill that role. As he called the big questions, duty called us to explore them, and many voters reveled in the debate. Now in 2000, there's much more ado in the political arena about which nothing is written, while hundreds of column inches are devoted to the latest polls and the candidates' family dramas. With the Supreme Court and an amorphous economy's future in the balance, Americans see the most important presidential contest of the last 30 years as the Seinfeld election--a campaign about nothing.