See How They Ran: The Changing Role of The Presidential Candidate.

Believe it or not, there was a time when presidential candidates didn't "run" but rather "stood" for office. Instead of mounting a traveling air show that hit three media markets per day, they wrote lengthy letters outlining their policies, views, and intentions. In those quaint days, the debate was not how to inject "substance" into campaigns, but how "seemly" it was for candidates to go out on the campaign trail and stump at all.

Fast forward to 1988: Willie Horton and flag burning; handlers and photo opportunities. The use of soundbites, polls, and negative advertising, pundits say, have conspired to "trivialize American democracy." Alexis de Tocqueville's fears that the American government would become one "grand electioneering machine" have finally come true.

Not so fast, says Gil Troy, a McGill University history professor who examines how presidential candidates have behaved over the past 200 years. The remarkably sophisticated road shows that today pass for political campaigns are not a harbinger of America's decline, according to Troy. Instead, they're just the latest chapter in a longstanding struggle "to develop a popular and legitimate protocol for electing a president."

Since the first truly popular presidential campaign, when President Martin Van Buren battled for reelection against William Harrison in 1840, Americans have found campaigns "too lengthy, too costly, too nasty, and too silly," Troy writes. Then, as now, the agenda was simple: Get elected. Then, as now, Americans wanted candidates to discuss issues that would shape the nation. Then, as now, candidates maneuvered to avoid being pinned down. In 1860, William Cullen Bryant, an advisor to Abraham Lincoln, cautioned: "Make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises." Lincoln replied, "I appreciate the danger against which you would guard me." And he took the advice.

As for the new insidiousness of photo ops and soundbites? In 1924, Calvin Coolidge's campaign spent $120,000 for a series of "nonpartisan" radio addresses over 500 stations, supplementing them with choreographed images of the candidate chopping trees and pitching hay. Nor was 1988 unique in campaign history for its negativity. In 1884, rumors circulated that Republican candidate James G. Blaine had fathered an illegitimate son. In 1912, an embittered William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt described each other in such lofty terms as "puzzlewit," "fathead," "egotist," and "demagogue."

History amply suggests that the American voter's dissatisfaction has a cause far deeper than contemporary technological dislocation. The real problem stems neither from flaws in American political or cultural structure, nor shallow candidates and venal consultants. Rather, Troy argues, Americans find themselves in this jam because of a fundamental conflict the Founding Fathers failed to resolve: whether we are a democracy ruled by popular opinion or a democracy guided by a republican elite who "know best." Troy writes, "Shall the president be a king or a prime minister, the most virtuous man or the most representative one?" Because the presidency melds the ceremony of a king with the pragmatic politics of a prime minister, candidates struggle to be both of the people and above them - a truth that's brought countless upperclass patricians posing with pork rinds. Thus, 1988's numbing and "superficial" focus on character was not a disturbing aberration, Troy writes, but "a return to the Founding Fathers' republican notion that good character was the most important requirement for a good president."

So the nation has seen it all before. Does that mean that we're doomed to an endless loop of bad video replays? Troy argues that there was, in fact, a golden age of campaigning, the period from 1896 to 1944. The "Campaign Special," rumbling through America morning, noon, and night, displayed the nominees in unguarded moments, be it Charles Hughes running to catch his own campaign train or Al Smith greeting early risers in his pajamas. And while most of the rear-platform rituals highlighted the candidates' personalities, their schedules were built around a series of policy addresses.

Could we return to such a "golden age?" To those of us who slogged across America with the candidates in 1988, the prospects look dim. At a Harvard postmortem of that campaign, Roger Ailes, Ed Rollins, and other strategists together pondered ways to improve the process: change campaign finance laws, close polls at the same time, change media coverage, change debate formats, and so on. All well and good, but would the strategists change their ways, too? Ed Rollins summed up the consensus: "I think until such a time as [the American public] rejects the negative commercials ... and says |What is it that you're all about?' and |What is it that you're going to do when you are leading this country?', the campaign manager is going to continue to do what he has to do to win."

Which leads us back to the ultimate players in America's presidential campaigns: the voters. Soundbites, choreographed photo ops, and the Willie Horton school of advertising have existed so long because we respond to them. Abolish faxes, staged events, and high-powered image-makers, and we've still got the culture that made William McKinley preen for the cameras on his front porch in Canton, Ohio.