THE 30-SECOND television spot advertisement, basic weapon of the modern American political campaign, is incompatible with the republican form of government that James Madison and his colleagues designed for this country in 1787. So the 1994 campaign has shown us.
The framers of the Constitution wanted a deliberative system of government. They rejected a populist democracy, in which the public would directly decide every issue, because they thought it would risk majority tyranny and demagoguery.
Instead, as Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10, they chose "to enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial (partisan) considerations."
Not many Americans today think of their representative body, Congress, in those terms: distinguished by wisdom, patriotism and love of justice. Representatives and senators rather are presumed to be corrupt, hateful, evil.
The 30-second spot imprints that dark image on the voter's mind. It is not a device useful for the serious discussion of ideas. Its utility -- its powerful utility -- is to destroy an opponent by negatives.
The point is not a partisan one. Candidates of both parties have used negative TV spots in this just completed campaign. Indeed, they were driven to. As Gresham's law says, bad money drives out good, so the negative spot tends to drive out other kinds of campaigning. It is there, and very few candidates can resist its lure.
Moreover, truth is not a necessary element in spot campaign ads. Lies are effective, and it is so hard for truth to catch up with them.
But hasn't political campaigning in the United States been slanderous from the start? Yes, it has. But the vicious newspaper attacks of the year 1800 or 1900 were very different in their effect on the system.
Television has an emotional power, an immediacy that the written word can hardly match. As a student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism put it to me the other day: "It's harder to filter television, to screen it. With print you have to reason. Television goes right through to your emotions."
Money intensifies the damage. Because we have no effective limits on campaign financing, a candidate empty of ideas or qualifications -- a Michael Huffington -- can use television ads without end to make himself a challenger.
No other democracy allows such corruption of the political process. Spot political advertising is generally prohibited.
Instead, countries such as Israel and Britain make extended time available to political parties on television to argue their cases. American campaigns would be far less degrading if we imposed such a rule by law.
But we have a First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech, and many assume that a rule against spot political advertising would violate it. I am not so sure.
Any regulation of political speech would certainly come to the Supreme Court with heavy constitutional doubts. But a restriction on spot advertising would not be based on the viewpoint of the speaker, like the old cases of punishment for radical speech. It would merely regulate the format.
Professor Vincent Blasi, a First Amendment specialist at the Columbia Law School, was skeptical when the idea was first put to him. His judicial hero is Justice Brandeis, who said that the remedy for bad speech is not silence but countering speech.
But Professor Blasi did note that the Brandeisian process of reflection, of good speech correcting bad, may not work with spot advertising in the days before an election.
"Those who won our independence," Justice Brandeis wrote in 1927, believed that in government "the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary." They believed, he said, "in the power of reason as applied through public discussion."
Anthony Lewis is a columnist for the New York Times.