Whew. What baloney we churned out last week. All these tactics and ploys; all these diversions. At some point, we-media and politicians-are going to figure out what most civilians already understand: this is a very serious election. The old diversionary stuff-flaming bimbos, vanity candidacies, debate debates, killer negative ads-isn’t working this time because the electorate isn’t the same old apathetic floating national sitcom that takes a peek at the campaign after the World Series and then slouches toward the voting booth a week later. Kathy Frankovic, who runs polling for CBS News, says that the number of people who say they’re “paying a lot of attention” to the election is running 20 percent higher than in 1988. Larry Hugick of Gallup says that earlier in the year, when people were asked about their own futures, “we found some pretty scary stuff, a large percentage of Americans-about 50 percent-were concerned about losing ground.” Concerned about losing their jobs, their homes, about being unable to pay for their kids’ education. Scared to death, in fact.

The fear has been manifest all year. Voters confront candidates-angry, defiant … and then dissolve into tears. Bill Clinton has told friends how startling-and daunting-the sheer emotion he’s encountered on the road has been. George Bush, locked in his presidential bubble, hasn’t experienced the fear as intimately, and therefore has seemed tone-deaf, eager to rehearse the cons and dodges that worked in other years, when politics wasn’t so serious a business.

It isn’t just the economy, which-as the president has disastrously insisted-isn’t quite awful. It’s the economy plus the vague realization that a corner has been turned and we, as a nation, are suddenly on new turf, robbed of sovereignty and security by a new global interdependence. The nature of this infant epoch is so uncertain that a term has yet to be coined to define it. For the moment, it is merely the successor to what has come before: post-cold-war, post-industrial, post-modern. The small print of both the Bush and Clinton plans confirms how wrenching the transition will be. Even the president’s modest reductions in the defense budget will cost 906,000 jobs over the next five years, according to the Defense Budget Project; Bill Clinton’s marginally less modest cuts will cost an additional 100,000, more or less. There will also be 500,000 fewer members of the armed forces, most of whom will deserve more productive employment than hamburger-flipping … and countless others whose manufacturing jobs will drift elsewhere as part of the natural evolution of global trade. What will they do? Even if the economy surges again, will there be enough of the “high-wage, high-skill” jobs Bill Clinton say she wants to “create” to go around? No one knows. All this at a moment of great social uncertainty, a moment when the supportive balm of family and community has frayed for far too many and a new tribalism– brutish, mindless, but comfortable–looms as too convenient an alternative.

These are the grand, if subliminal, themes of this election. Clinton has experienced the anguish, but doesn’t seem to understand what’s expected of him: not just solutions but some reassurance about the principles that would inform his presidency. He used to talk about “reciprocal responsibility,” the need to rebuild a sense of community; that’s been lost along the way and, with it, a chance for real stature. George Bush remains clueless on all counts. He will “go negative” relentlessly in the weeks to come, oblivious to the yearning for the precise opposite of what he’s been offering. This is no year for ploys–except perhaps for a killer positive ad, one that restores trust, gives hope and conveys a sense that the candidate, against all odds, is sentient and whole.