Bob Kolasky is the managing editor of IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is bob@voxcap.com

It must have happened to you. If you are an American voter and have had more than a handful of conversations about the upcoming presidential election, you probably have heard a version of a familiar refrain. Conversation about the race between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush often go something like this: "Neither of these guys really excite me." Occasionally it is starker: "They're both losers," a generally thoughtful colleague told me last week.

Even among loyal Republicans and Democrats, real enthusiasm behind either of the presumptive candidates is rare. Neither Gore nor Bush tends to inspire intense affection. Instead, party loyalists seem to have made tactical decisions to support their candidates because one or the other has "the best chance to win."

In particular, much of the electorate has an unusually negative perception of Gore. In a recent survey by CBS News, a full 40% of Americans said they think unfavorably of the vice president. As George Stephanopoulos noted on ABC's "This Week," to win, Gore is going to have to make Bush as unpopular as he is. Given the tenor of the Gore campaign thus far -- watch how many times he describes a Bush proposal as "risky" -- it appears the vice president realizes his challenge. This means that the winner in November is going to be the candidate voters dislike least.

How we got here

Neither Gore or Bush inspire intense affection

Welcome to electoral politics, circa 2000, where it is not about building up candidates but rather about tearing them down. A lot of ink has been spilled discussing why fewer and fewer potential voters go to the poll each year and whether it matters. Suffice it to say, that electoral turnout in 1996 was the lowest since 1924, and many commentators, such as IC's own Jack Doppelt, expect it to be even lower in 2000.

In accordance with this low turnout, party identification also has dropped. People are less likely to strongly associate themselves with the major political parties. National Election Studies finds that, since 1958, the number of Americans who are independent or apolitical or lean independent has risen 13%, from 23% to 36%. And only 29% of the electorate consider themselves strongly partisan.

This is a negative occurrence, says Martin Wattenberg, author of The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952-1996. "As people stop caring about parties, they stop caring about politics," he says. The decline in party loyalty has helped change the makeup of the parties. As political commentator John Judis writes in his new book The Paradox of Democracy, "[P]olitical parties have become subordinated to political consultants, media experts, pollsters and public-relations flacks, none of whom are accountable to voters."

Still, the party's core voters, augmented by the new party regulars and special interests, hold as much sway as ever over who has a chance to be president -- as the 1996 and 2000 presidential primaries demonstrate.

This creates a phenomenon where party loyalists still reign supreme in selecting the candidates while fewer Americans embrace the parties. Thus party loyalists are a smaller percentage of the population than in recent memory. Given that trend, how can you really be surprised that the nominees selected do not excite the voters writ large?

No alternative?

Some argue that the existing two parties are to blame -- that voters are unhappy with the entrenched interests of the Democratic and Republican parties. The argument is that parties are alternatively controlled by their extreme wings (minority-interest groups in the Democratic Party, the religious right in the Republican Party), and beholden to special interests (labor and Hollywood in the Democratic Party, the business lobby in the Republican Party).

Some, such as Ralph Nader and his supporters, decry the parties for being a duopoly. All of these arguments come from the same refrain: The political parties do not represent the people.

That view contributes to the theory that the United States needs an alternative party that would better represent the entire country. The problem, of course, is that there is no consensus on who is not represented. Thus far, the current political era, like the ones before it, has not seen the creation of any sustainable popular alternative to either the Democratic or Republican party, in part because the choices have been so diverse.

Ross Perot's United We Stand movement, which became the Reform Party, has come the closest. Created out of a mix of balance-budget populism, political reform and economic nationalism, it since has lost its moorings as Democrats and Republicans have adopted parts of its message. Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who left the Reform Party after being elected, is the only candidate to win a significant election under the Reform label.

Meanwhile, Nader's Green Party is trying to start a movement from the anti-corporate left but thus far has been unsuccessful. Washington insiders such as Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH) have impotently tried to convince religious conservatives to abandon the Republican Party for an alternative. And the Libertarian Party, led by Harry Browne, has failed to attract more than 2% of the vote on the national ticket.

Counter this with the brief boomlet in the mid-1990s, promulgated mostly by political journalists, for a third party to emerge among centrists, and you get a confusing picture. Then, public figures like Gen. Colin Powell and Sens. Bill Bradley (NJ) and Sam Nunn (GA) hinted that they were considering challenging the Democratic and Republican parties from the center -- or the "radical middle" as Newsweek referred to it in a 1995 cover story.

They never did. Neither did Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) this time around, despite polls showing that he would have had much voter support had he chosen to do so. The consensus seems to be that such a challenge is too difficult against the still potent party machinery and that the rules, and fund-raising obligations, make the odds against such an effort insurmountable.

Will it ever change?

Speculation about third-party challenges to Democrats and Republicans have been a constant in 20th-century American politics, and at various times did emerge, albeit usually briefly. Like the Dixiecrat Party, the American Independent Party, the Bull Moose Party and the Progressive Party, it is hard to imagine any of the current rivals ever unseating the Democrats and the Republicans.

This, however, raises some significant questions if Americans continue to disdain party identity. If fewer and fewer people consider themselves Democrats and Republicans, yet Democrats and Republicans are the ones who always choose those who have the chance to get elected, do we not as a nation risk a future of candidates who hold little appeal to the electorate as a whole?

Today, three frequently discussed scenarios could counter this trend. The first is to open the candidate-selection process to non-party loyalists in the same way that enabled McCain to win a handful of Republican primaries despite not being the choice of Republicans.

The second is to try to start a movement from within to redefine the establishment of the Democratic and Republican parties, in hopes of galvanizing a larger chuck of the electorate to pledge allegiance to a party. (The New Democrat and Progressive caucuses in the Democratic Party and the Main Street Partnership and the Club for Growth in the GOP are examples of groups trying to do that.)

Altenratively, there is the third-party scenario, where a new party would emerge and appeal to those who have rejected the existing ones.

Barring a sea change between now and November, none of those fundamental realignments will happen. The byproduct of this fall's elections, therefore, almost certainly will be politics as usual. "Political America sleepwalked into the next century," Judis wrote in describing the current state of politics. In 2000, that sleepwalk will continue.

Sound familiar?

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1972, an up-and-coming political reporter named David Broder decried the "confrontation politics" that had overrun the United States. If such politics are to be avoided, Broder wrote:

There must be real choices presented at election time -- choices involving more than a selection between two sincere-sounding, photogenic graduates of some campaign consultant's academy of political and dramatic arts. The candidates must come to the voters with programs that are comprehensible and relevant to our problems; and they must have the kind of backing that makes it possible for them to act on their pledges once in office. The only instrument I know of that can nominate such candidates,commit them to a program, and give them the leverage and alliances in government that can enable them to keep their promises is the political party.

Twenty-eight years later, the analysis of Broder, now the nation's foremost political reporter, is still applicable. Yet the country's two foremost parties do not seem to have risen to the challenge. One wonders how long Americans will give them an opportunity to do so? When will they demand an alternative?