This toll's for thee.

November 3, 1994, the day after election day: I have the privilege of hitching a ride into "the city" - as we Queens residents refer to Manhattan's Skyscraper National Park - with a conservative activist wannabe politician. His side won yesterday.

He details how the new Republican Congress and the new Republican governor will create a pristine utopia unhindered by the constraints of government regulation. Traffic runs smoothly and my driver is in a happy mood, buoyed by yesterday's electoral successes and perhaps by the scent of political appointment.

But then we come to the epicenter of evil - the lines leading to the toll booths of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. My interlocutor shakes his fist at the skies, curses this monument to liberal government duplicity, and rages at the extortion of the $3.50 one-way toll. This, he declaims, while pointing to the lines of exasperated drivers, is what big government does: pads payrolls and afflicts innocent motorists with unreasonable demand - all to feed the welfare-state monster.

This! This will all change, he promises me, when the newly ascendant conservative revolution comes to power.

Two years have now passed. I think about my conversation and his political promises as I drive back from vacation in August and spend $11 driving to and from Brooklyn through Staten Island in New Jersey and back.

My political pal did join the new conservative revolution. He has a very responsible job with the agency that supervises many New York-area bridge and tunnels. However, New York motorists have not been liberated from the fetters of big government as my $11 tab clearly shows.

We see here the limits of political power. I remind myself of this in the midst of the 1996 election campaign in which the candidates and their spinmeisters have declared an epic struggle between the forces of post-hippie decadence that threaten the nation's moral fiber and a reactionary conservativism that delights in withholding welfare monies from widows and orphans.

Take for example a recent report on skyrocketing drug abuse among teenagers. Are teens hooked on drugs in your town? The talk show hosts think so and blame one man: William Jefferson Clinton, the college student who didn't inhale.

I consult our resident expert. my daughter, a junior in a New York City public high school. "Are your drug-using classmates influenced by who sits in the Oval Office?" She rolls her eyes.

It is an unscientifically posed question, of course, to an unscientific sample. But her incredulity suggest to me that the days are long gone when a sitting president might be a model or a guide for any kind of behavior, least of all that of teen-agers.

`Twas not always so. In 1968, my wife and I were both eleven years old. I was growing up in suburban Long Island; she, a recently arrived immigrant, was living in Brooklyn. We both recall being enthralled and horrified by the political events of that year, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, as well as the Democratic Convention. We followed everything with keen interest; these events mattered.

Not now, not for the younger generation. While watching the Republican Convention in San Diego this year, my fourteen-year-old son had one question for me: "Is this why the Mets are playing in Mexico?"

I'm not old enough (yet) to complain about this generation not being up to snuff. When I was their age, I was interested in politics, now they are interested in computers, science, and popular music.

In many ways, they are smarter. They have already concluded what has taken me decades to arrive at: politicians, at best and at worst, have only a marginal impact on what this years campaign experts have told us are fundamental political issues-family values, sexual morality, addiction, and personal character.

If my enraged interlocutor and political appointee can't affect the bridge and tunnel tolls that fetter New York's drivers - something that government actually controls - why should we believe that politicians can have any impact on behaviors and attitudes that he far beyond the realm of political influence?