Cynicism on stage.

Here's my idea: Let's reduce the voting age to eight. That way, instead of listening to the pundits ooh and aah over Elizabeth Dole's ability to ape Jenny Jones, we might get to see the edifying spectacle of politicians from both parties explaining to a third-grader why she can't have dinner, shoes, or a place to live.

The best part of the conventions--and they both put Triumph of the Will to shame--was watching Mark Shields, Paul Gigot, and other pundits flop around like carp on a slab of Formica.

Reduced to being instant-replay theater critics (and we're talking really bad theater), they were forced to say things like, "That cutaway of Clinton didn't really work," or, "Boy, Tipper's photographs in that video were great." I kept waiting for them to go to a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down approach to reviewing each speech. Even NPR covered the Democratic convention as if it were primarily theater. With the Hair song "Let the Sunshine In" playing in the back-ground, NPR cast the demonstrators outside the convention as entertaining but irrelevant throwbacks to 1968.

Meanwhile, one million children lay poised on the downward chute to increased poverty, neglect, and despair--thanks to the collusion of the two parties whose scripted spectacles about helping families were meant to distract us from this reality.

But that's how we stage the future in America. We showcase wealthy disabled celebrities like Christopher Reeve and Jim Brady, who tug at our heartstrings and allow us to feel so good about how compassionate we are, while our President signs a bill that will exclude the disabled children of low-income families from the most basic forms of federal assistance.

Clinton has chosen to handle the welfare disaster with the utmost cynicism. Having signed this revolting piece of legislation, he will now campaign against it, insisting that he must be reelected in order to make the law more humane. Convention managers, with the compliance of the mainstream media, papered over major dissent within the party.

Most pundits cast his signing of the bill as a "home run" and "right in step" with the desires of the American people, even though 40 percent of those polled didn't know enough about the bill to offer an opinion, and 50 percent would oppose it if it meant throwing more children into poverty. Pundits like Morton Kondracke, who acknowledged the bill is dreadful, asserted confidently that the flaws will indeed be fixed.

Don't hold your breath. Poor people don't vote--in 1994, only 7.7 percent of voters came from families with incomes under $15,000--and poor children, of course, can't vote. No public-opinion constituency for Clinton here.

Now, I have a theory about public support for cutting welfare. Certainly ignorance, prejudice, and repetitive stress syndrome (the stereotyping of welfare recipients as lazy, over-weight, promiscuous, black female leeches) all contribute to the welfare backlash. But the other answer can be found in one of this summer's best-selling books, The Dilbert Principle.

There aren't 750,000 copies in print for nothing. The book shows how nearly all American workers hate their jobs and think their bosses or "management teams" are complete idiots. Most working Americans would be thrilled to quit tomorrow and begin early retirement rather than be subjected to any more TQM training ("Total Quality Management," for those of you who have been spared). The proletarianization of so many jobs; the speed-up in so many lines of work, including, and often especially, in the professions; the threat of downsizing--all have made work more stressful and infuriating.

People figure if they have to put up with clueless managers who constantly say, "I hear you" while staring off into space; if they have to attend staff retreats with role-playing exercises; if they have to put up with the "hoteling of cubicles" (making workers play musical offices so they never may individualize their work stations with photos of their kids)--then why should welfare recipients get to stay home and watch reruns of Taxi?

This is why I wish Buchanan, xenophobe that he is, was still in the race. At least he was talking about job flight, downsizing, corporate responsibility, and the falling standard of living for many workers. All we're getting now is voodoo economics redux from one side and orgasms over school uniforms from the other.

So no more of these family-style televised conventions. Give kids the right to vote, and hand out video cameras to poor kids. Since they are the ones who are going to suffer, they ought to have the right to record the two candidates who are prattling on about responsibility, empowerment, family values, villages, and ending welfare as we know it.

The production values wouldn't match the hooey we got from San Diego and Chicago, but it would be refreshing--and enlightening--to see the world from the ground up.