In the US election year now beginning, more than government is at stake. Everywhere politics is changing beyond recognition by the communications revolution.

Radio and television were the advance guard of this new world. With satellites, television became a global, interlocking network. The Internet duplicated that feat for computers, which add to passive viewership the possibility of interactive participation with what is on the screen. With the invention of the photo-optic cable, the television set, the computer, and heaven knows what else, may soon be conjoined into a single device. And "virtual reality" - the three dimensional simulation of experience - has already debuted.

There is nothing to compare this new environment to except the natural environment. Computers have "viruses," and there is talk of the "natural evolution" of software, which, like Darwin's organisms, will fend for themselves in the new environment - virtual organisms evolving in virtual seas.

Warfare, too, is being reinvented. One army may send its hostile "information" (viruses, etc.) or other means to attack an enemy country's information. A modern nation whose military information is corrupted or disarmed - its satellites flying out of their orbits, its computer screens foaming with nonsense, its missiles curving back to strike its own cities - could be as thoroughly humbled as one smashed by physical bombs. Iraq learned something of this in the Gulf War as American "smart bombs" destroyed Iraqi command and control links.

Of all the realms invaded by the communications revolution, none is more wide open to transformation than politics. Politics is always about appearances, a realm where men and women present themselves, their opinions, and their policies to their fellows for decision and judgment. In a realm governed by appearances, the ability to create fictitious worlds must be revolutionary.

In the early decades of the communications revolution, totalitarian regimes sought to impose fictitious realities on their peoples by force. They backed up propaganda with terror. Because their propaganda played to a captive audience, it could afford to be crude, even preposterous.

Political parties in the democracies, with no force at their disposal, faced the challenge of actually persuading voters. Consequently, the arts of communication in these free countries are far subtler, skillful, and more varied than those in the totalitarian ones. What is perhaps harder, they must first persuade the media-glutted voters to tear themselves away from entertainment - or, these days, "infotainment" - long enough to attend to a political message at all. (The American audience for the verdict in the sensational O.J. Simpson murder trial last year was about 100 million people, that for the 1992 Democratic Party presidential nominating convention about 7.5 million.)

For any politician, the battle against political apathy in a media-glutted society is as difficult as the battle against the rival candidate. More candidacies die of failure to achieve name-recognition than at the hands of their opponents' barbs.

In order to persuade voters, candidates mount multi-media pageants costing tens of millions of dollars. Those "covering" the pageant are in fact an intrinsic part of it. At large, planned political events, journalists outnumber, and immensely out spend, the "participants." At the 1992 Republican Party convention, for example, 15,000 journalists were present to "cover" the 4,303 delegates, who in any case, had very little to decide. We describe these events as gatherings of politicians that attract journalists eager to "cover" the events. But it would be more accurate to see them as gatherings of journalists that attract politicians eager to be voluminously covered - that is, to get days of free political advertising.

As the numbers of journalists covering major political events suggests, the size of the communications apparatus has increased to a point where quantitative change becomes qualitative change. The communications industry is like a standing army - one that, like every standing army, abhors idleness, and wishes to use its instruments. But there are few signs that voters feel well-served by the blizzard of new technology, though in the last few years thoughtful people have been trying to devise more fruitful forms of coverage. As the machinery of communications has grown, political participation has shrunk. Like the population of Baghdad under the "smart bombs" of the information age, the electorate seems to cower under the bombardment form the satellites overhead.

Whatever else the instruments of communication have achieved, they have not made good the loss of the great intermediary institutions that once served to connect people and government - the voluntary associations so much praised by Alexis de Tocqueville, trade unions, and the political parties themselves, with all their local activity and strength.

And yet are the aristocrats of the information age - the tv newsreaders, the owners of the great multi-media conglomerates, the political candidates and office-holders, presiding like lords of old over a bewildered electronic peasantry? Power is the capacity to decide great matters. However, the mighty of the information age do not so much dictate as grovel. For even as they deliver information, they also seek to glean it from the public, through polling, focus groups, and all the other instruments of market research and public opinion research. The two-way flow--of messages delivered to the public from so-called decision-makers, and the views and opinions gleaned from research from the public -- is the great thoroughfare of politics.

Consider the movie director who submits his film to the verdict of an audience of carefully selected target viewers who register their reactions through instruments on the arms of their chairs. If they do not like the sad ending, it will be changed to a happy one. Or consider the candidate or his consultant sitting behind the one-way mirror watching a focus group. When someone in the group yawns over an issue, Bosnia for example -- or all foreign policy -- the candidate will soon discard that issue from his campaign. Newt Gingrich crafted the campaign that won for the Republicans control of the US congress for the first time in 40 years by this method.

Or consider the political candidate surrounded by his pollster, his team of speech-writers, his propaganda experts, and his advertising director. How much of what he offers the public can he call his own? How much discretion remains to him? The danger in these operations is not the potential abuse of power - not the imposition by an elite of its interests and views on a mass - but the abdication of power, or perhaps one should say the disintegration of power.

Its not easy, even in theory, to imagine how to curb the misuse of the new techniques and seize the opportunities they offer. The instruments of publicity on the one hand and of market and opinion research on the other are today the high cards in the games whose winnings are wealth (for example, market-share) and high station (for example, elected office.) Banning either is inconceivable; even restricting either is hard to conceive.

Poll results are the gold standard of the political realm today. They have become the axle around which the political world -- campaign strategies and coverage alike -- turn. That this is so is a tribute to their accuracy, even when used judiciously, their predictive value.

All we can be sure of for now is that they and other new communications have opened up a wide, hitherto unknown field of political maneuver and action--a field that is the breeding ground of new shapes and forms of politics. In a series of pieces, of which this is the first, on the 1996 American presidential election campaign, I hope to chronicle and analyze these new forms as they are born and grow in the new environment, and their importance for politics around the world.

Just this year, for example, Americans have had such novelties as nationwide tour to ostensibly sell books actually serve as a proto-presidential campaign (courtesy of General Colin Powell). As the General sold his memoirs to the public, it was never quite clear whether the book was being used to promote the possible candidacy or the candidacy was being used to sell the book. It has also brought the one-man campaign, courtesy of the sheer power of a private fortune and consisting chiefly of paid advertising (Ross Perot and Steve Forbes).

All this has happened before the first votes are cast. In February, the real contest begins.