Aides described him as wistful at the end of what is likely to be his last campaign. Wistful but careful: he ducked reporters’ questions about his Indonesian-cash connection and turned down Ross Perot’s challenge of a one-on-one debate.

Voters seemed to greet the breathless endgame with a thundering ““So what?’’ It was much the same as their reaction all year–from New Hampshire to the conventions. It’s early, the pundits and the handlers said. People won’t start paying attention until the fall. But as the last television spots unspooled a final dreary round of charge and countercharge, it was clear that many Americans had no intention of tuning in. What happened? Did a sound economy diminish any sense of urgency? Were the two major candidates already such familiar faces that the decision was made months ago? Is there a better way for Americans to pick a president? NEWSWEEK reporters Bill Turque, Weston Kosova, Daniel McGinn and Carla Power asked a group of prominent writers, academics, corporate executives and political professionals what might be done to reconnect voters to the political process.

Miami businessman

THIS CAMPAIGN NEEDED SOME BIG ISSUES. President Clinton has become the little-things president. He’s running as a city manager, offering up these tiny little programs, like school uniforms or teen curfews. Senator Dole has seemingly been unable to break through with a more powerful, principled message to get people’s attention. The tax-cut proposal is a very powerful idea. It would rearrange our relationship with government, because government would be smaller. But it hasn’t captured the public’s imagination.

In the past few campaigns there’s been a lot of negativity. It works not by turning people on but by turning people off. Some big ideas would turn people on. Either that or a crisis. As it stands, we’re sedated. There’s no big threat looming. Things aren’t going great, and things aren’t going bad. A crisis, as strange as it sounds, would make passive people active.

““NBC Nightly News’’ anchorman

HOWEVER THE ELECTION TURNS OUT, THE morning after we will be greeted with cries of reform. From the beginning voter interest has been indifferent, and, alas, there’s every reason to believe voting levels Tuesday will be at or near record-low levels. A good deal of the blame will be assigned to the pedestrian performances of the candidates. But we can do something about the long, chaotic gestation period that delivers them to us. Here’s a plan to bring some order to the process, and perhaps with it a way to increase voter interest.

First, delay all state primaries until June. Then stage primaries over four consecutive weeks, choosing the order by lottery. For example, the first week in June all of the states in the Pacific time zone would hold their primaries simultaneously. The next week all of the willing states in the Eastern time zone. And so on until the end of June.

Second, candidates would agree to a campaign-spending cap of $2 million in each time zone. They would also limit their media budgets to $50 million each. National political parties and special interests would be limited to $25 million. In the final week of the campaign, all candidates who exceed 20 percent in national polls would be permitted three minutes of air time on all television and cable networks to address a specific issue. They would not be allowed to mention their opponents’ names.

Third, the two national parties would agree to hold two-day conventions, no later than the end of July. The first weekend in August the other parties (Reform Party, Libertarian Party, etc.) would hold their conventions simultaneously. All cable news stations would pool their resources to provide extended coverage, switching from one to another. Fourth, debates between the major-party candidates–and independents who have reached at least 20 percent in national polls–would be held each Sunday throughout October.

Fifth, Election Day would be moved to the first weekend in November, and polls would be open for 24 hours. For example, polls in the Eastern time zone would be open from 6 p.m. Saturday until 6 p.m. Sunday. In the Pacific time zone, from 3 Saturday to 3 Sunday.

We live in a world where competition for attention is fierce. Our presidential campaigns, the very definition of who we are at any one time in our history, are running a distant last to a Coca-Cola jingle or a Nike slogan or the latest anti-acid tablet. If we don’t sell hard the idea of participation, we will be left with a system beholden only to the highly motivated, very narrowly defined special interests whose only interest is advancing their own causes.

President, Bennington College

POLITICIANS PAY A TERRIBLE price if they acknowledge the complexity of our problems. The pressure to turn everything into a boxing match is overwhelming. Put on one color of trunks and you’re for affirmative action. Put on another color and you’re against. You’re for free trade or you’re against it. You’re for immigration or you’re against it.

One shudders to think what a contemporary version of the Lincoln-Douglas debates would look like, even if the players were to remain the same. Bill Clinton and Bob Dole are both smart and thoughtful men. But you and I know perfectly well that they must submit to a process where their intelligence, individuality and spontaneity virtually disappear. They are trained to avoid anything suggesting complexity, anything verging on the honest and genuinely controversial. All this orchestrating leads to a dumbing-down effect that is brutal for the process. The press has a grave responsibility here. It needs to get out of its sensationalizing mode and insist that candidates speak in a way that respects the nuances of an issue. Politicians need to be in a world where the price to be paid is for oversimplifying.

The public is ready for something much more interesting. It didn’t buy Dole’s tax cut because it was too simple-minded. They want welfare reform, but the kind that continues to respond to overwhelm- ing social inequity. They don’t want kids starving in the streets. People want seri- ous health-care reform, and are even ready to pay higher premiums. Issues of this complexity cannot be addressed or advanced by snappy one-liners.

President of Amway Corp., Republican activist and co-owner of Orlando Magic

THERE’S A CYNICISM OUT THERE THAT makes it difficult for people to distinguish a good politician from a bad politician. That’s why the issues of character and integrity don’t matter to voters: they think all politicians are bad news, that they all have their hands in the cookie jar.

How to solve it? It would help to open up politics to citizen legislators, to attract people besides lawyers and academicians, people who’ve signed the front of a paycheck. To attract those people, we may need to do something that at first may seem contradictory: reduce the financial-disclosure requirements.

Having to release your income-tax forms and tell what you made last year dissuades many successful people from running for office. I know Ross Perot hasn’t done much to enhance the image of the citizen legislator, but why should he ruin it for everyone? We need more politicians who know about creating jobs and creating wealth–people of all colors and both genders. And we need fewer people for whom politics is the best-paying job they’ve ever had.

Committee for the Study of the American Electorate

IF YOU WANT TO FIX OUR CUR- rent political system, two things stand out above all others: First we need to cease being the only democracy in the world which doesn’t regulate political advertising on television. Second, we need to realign our two major political parties so that they offer relevant choices to all Americans. Political ads are giving Americans a choice between bad and awful, distorting and undermining debate, increasing campaign costs and driving voters from the polls. We can change that by a formal restriction that would require the purchaser of ads to speak to the camera for the duration of the ad–letting people say what they want but returning our dialogue to debate and accountability. And we can give people better choices than one party that has moved far to the right of most voters and another that is so driven by polls that it leaves out those at the bottom of the income scale. That would be done if moderate and liberal Republicans would be willing to get their hands dirty in grass-roots politics to take the party back from the right wing or by the emergence of a center third party.

Radio talk-show host, Ellijay, Ga.

DON’T BLAME THE GOVERNMENT FOR OUR sorry state of affairs. You think politicians are crooked? Well, you elected them. If people are so upset about the way Washington is–or isn’t–run, they ought to do something about it. How many Americans who complain about ““the system’’ can actually name their elected officials? Or know how they voted on important issues? Not many.

If you hire a guy to mow your lawn, you don’t pay him unless he’s done a good job. Well, we pay our servants in Congress $133,000 a year. They are our employees. So why do so few of us write and call them when we think they’re messing up? You want to make a difference? Make a pest of yourself. Let your public servants know who you are and what you believe in. Find out how they vote. Drop in for a visit. Always remember: there are plenty of people who would love to have their jobs. They need you a whole lot more than you need them.

Founder, Muriel Siebert & Co. Inc., a New York brokerage

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THE election is Tuesday. Nobody’s talking about it, nobody’s watching it, nobody cares. All anyone seems interested in is whether the Democrats will win the House. It’s a shame, but there’s a reason for it: there are plenty of jobs, the economy is solid and that makes people complacent. But the candidates didn’t help any. Neither of them talked about the problems and challenges people care about.

I don’t really expect them to talk about things like Medicare or health care–they’re too complicated. But they didn’t really discuss jobs, the effects of downsizing, how to fix Social Security, how to improve education. Dole tried to talk about taxes but didn’t do a good job of it; Clinton didn’t really talk about anything because he’s so far ahead.

In the future we should have more debates where the questions are asked by the public, so we’ll get nuts-and-bolts answers to questions about things like the economy. We should assure that a candidate who proposes to raise or lower taxes or start new programs explains how to pay for it. And we should force the candidates to really dig into the guts of what they think the country should be doing.

Shapiro Visiting Professor in Interna- tional Affairs at George Washington University; author of ““Temptations of a Superpower''

IT’S CLEARLY BEEN AN IRRESPONSIBLE campaign from both parties. Dole and Clinton have failed to address the issues that the American public is deeply concerned about. Clinton’s been talking about deficit reduction and economic growth, both of which are welcome. But has there been any real debate about the growing gap between rich and poor? Universal health insurance? Responses to the epidemic of crime and violence? Clinton did talk about these issues as a challenger in ‘92. Now that he’s defending his record, he talks happy talk.

Look at Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. Why did they evoke such a response? While they seemed extreme on some issues, they were raising real questions about issues like job security and free trade. But these issues scare candidates, who are squeamish about offending special-interest groups. It’s easier to make pie-in-the-sky promises about tax cuts or deficit reduction. The way we finance political campaigns invites corruption. And for the voters, it undermines the integrity of the entire political process.

Free TV for Straight Talk Coalition

NOT MANY AMERICANS MAY HAVE NO- ticed, but the 1996 campaign brought the start of something good: free TV air time for the presidential candidates to spend a few minutes a night talking about issues. Compared to political ads, the sound bites or even the debates, these mini-speeches were more accurate, more substantive and more forward-looking, according to experts who monitor campaign discourse. The trouble is, these free time slots were difficult for the mass audience to find.

Our group had asked the networks to simulcast them–all networks at the same time–in the heart of prime time, when the biggest audience in the country, including tens of millions of political dropouts, would be watching. Instead, the networks scattered them at different times around the dial. Even so, it was a good first step. It showed that changing the format can improve the discourse. Next time around let’s expand and refine this format, so we can move beyond campaigns of attack ads and sound bites.

Editor and publisher, The Chicago Reporter

ISSUES OF RACE RELATIONS, poverty, social issues, they’re just off the map this year in terms of the interest that’s being generated by the candidates. The leaders who are running for office are just papering over these deep social problems. Sure, they’ve talked about drugs. But it’s all been about polls and statistics, whether drug use is up or not, not why it is or how to stop it. The people at the bottom have become so cynical about politics that they don’t care who’s in charge. They don’t think it makes any difference who runs the country. To get these people plugged back in, you need a spokesperson from the community to get them interested. That’s the role Jesse Jackson used to play, but he’s past his prime. Of course you can blame it on the press because of the lack of substantive reporting, or you can blame it on the lackluster candidates. But in the end there’s something wrong with our process if this is the best people it can produce. The best people don’t want to run because of the money it takes and the shadow of corruption that hangs over all politicians. When good people don’t run, you’re left with the dregs, and it’s not surprising people tune out.

Editorial-page editor, Chicago Tribune

I DON’T SEE THAT THERE’S A HUGE PROBlem here. People aren’t engaged in the process because there are no compelling issues driving them to participate. It would be different if we didn’t have peace and prosperity. Americans know how to find the voting booth when something important is at stake.

Despite what the candidates say, the press is a straw issue. There is a medium for every taste in this country, somebody who puts a different slant on it. A lot of people would like to think that the media creates the whole thing. We’re just paid observers.