This year voting turnout could fall to a record presidential low. The decline partly reflects two dreadful candidates but also the long-term impoverishment of politics.

Membership organizations have been displaced by professional fund-raisers and TV spots. The time squeeze leaves no leisure for ordinary people to go to meetings. Civic values are crowded out by entertainment, celebrity, and marketing. If the Bush-Gore show has to compete as entertainment, it loses, and so do we.

What would a real stock market meltdown do to the economy and, not incidentally, to the presidential campaign?

The market has long been poised for a correction. Internet stock expectations were outlandish. Even the broader market has been experiencing inflated ratios of stock prices to company earnings not seen since 1929.

All it took for air to come out of the market were some moderate storm clouds: higher oil prices, which gave us a whiff of wider inflation; reduced corporate earnings; weakness and instability in the world's second-most-important currency, the euro; portents of war.