USTIN, Texas - This is a guide for the perplexed. And it is a message of comfort for those who find this year's presidential election disquieting:
You are not alone.
An election that was supposed to settle America's course for the new century is instead leaving the nation feeling unsettled.
The debates have been listless, the issue differences between Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore have been minor, and the leadership traits of the candidates themselves have not grown compelling, even after a week when shivers in the air on Wall Street and blood in the water off Yemen have offered daily reminders of the importance of national leadership.
The campaigns argue that the contrasts between the two men are substantial, and in truth the fine print of their proposals on Social Security, Medicare, and economics does reveal different emphases. But the two candidates are talking about the same issues, and in much the same way. There is no radical, daring proposal on either party's policy menu. The Democrat isn't offering a new blueprint for a new society, as Lyndon Johnson did in 1964. The Republican isn't presenting a new architecture for government, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980. The customers want spicy. The candidates are serving up mild.
The commentators argue that the campaign has come down to a contest over character, but though one man may stretch the truth too much and the other may lean on his advisers too much, the attention thus far has not been on character but on idiosyncracies - whether one candidate has an irritating smirk, for example, or the other is given to contemptuous sighs.
Smirks and sighs aside, both candidates are men of good character. But neither makes a room feel larger just by stepping into it.
Since the 1930s, every decade has been marked by a truly original character, a new kind of leader, a president who was both a noun and an adjective.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a Dutch patrician transformed into an apostle for the common American, a disabled leader who personified American vigor, an emotionally stifled man who lifted the American spirit in the 1930s, the inspiration for a generation of Rooseveltian leaders. Harry Truman was a Missouri farmer and haberdasher whose formative personal experience was combat in France in World War I, whose formative political experience was steering the nation to its final victories in World War II, whose vision prepared a war-weary America for a hard role in peace and whose presidency begat a style of politics still known as Trumanesque.
The 1950s were dominated by an amiable former general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who perfected the skill of making the difficult job of leadership seem easy. The next decade brought John F. Kennedy, who invented a new form of public presidential leadership while harnessing American idealism, and Lyndon B. Johnson, a son of hardscrabble Texas whose big dreams for the nation consumed him and his presidency. In the 1970s, Richard M. Nixon was forced from office and ''Nixonesque'' was transformed into a pejorative. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan seamlessly melded the worlds of politics and entertainment. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton rallied the nation for change, fought a trench war against House impeachment and prevailed in a Senate trial, and presided over unprecedented prosperity.
Against this backdrop, the first entrants of the first decade of the 21st century are decidedly pallid characters.
It is not only that the two nominees are essentially echoes, new versions and namesakes of older men, both of those more vivid men of politics than are their sons. It is also that they are echoes of each other.
Almost every analyst of this election has remarked upon the tendency of the two nominees to rush to the center. But that phenomenon occurs in many elections - the 1960 campaign between Kennedy and Nixon, for example - without dimming the distinctions between the two candidates. And not every election forces candidates to the center; Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover veered apart in 1932, just as Johnson and Senator Barry Goldwater did in 1964, and Jimmy Carter and Reagan did in 1980.
One of the causes, to be sure, is contentment. Until this week, there was little for Americans to be distressed about, little to challenge their sense of well-being.
But one of the causes almost certainly was the primary and caucus system, which in 2000 acted as a kind of process of natural selection, eliminating the candidates with distinctive edges, taking the contentious out of contention.
This time the primary system performed the unusual role of weeding out the unusual candidates - John McCain, a onetime Vietnam prisoner of war whose insurgency nearly toppled the Republican establishment, for example, or Elizabeth Dole, a woman with extensive Cabinet experience whose very candidacy stood as a challenge to more than two centuries of male domination - and rewarding the conventional figures. The primaries began with two overwhelming favorites, and ended with the very same candidates winning easy victories.
Now the campaign enters its final phase. The economy doesn't seem as robust as it did only a week ago; some stalwarts of the stock market, including widely held issues such as Lucent and Motorola, suffered enormous losses in a week's time. The world doesn't seem as safe as it did only a week ago; the long arm of terrorism struck again at a nation whose military, diplomatic, and business presence in the world is so extensive that it defies protection.
And in two days, in the heavily contested state of Missouri, the two candidates meet for their final debate. On paper that should be an important event; history shows that debates are important factors in elections, like this one, where the lead jumps from one candidate to the other.
But so far the two debates have had little impact.
The debate in St. Louis is both candidates' last chance - not only to revive a sleepy electorate but also to motivate the undecided voters whose verdict will become the nation's.
The outcome of an election without distinctive characteristics depends on two candidates finding a way to make memorable the distinctions between themselves. That's the leadership challenge of the moment, and for our future.
