During a televised debate Dec. 19 with Bill Bradley, Gore’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Gore challenged Bradley to agree to stop all campaign advertising for the duration of the race.

Thrusting a hand in Bradley’s direction, Gore said he would stop advertising if Bradley would do likewise, and offered to shake on the deal right then.

Sad to say, Bradley rebuffed Gore’s outstretched hand as well as his idea — but it’s a suggestion that ought to be seriously considered.

In the past 50 years or so, we citizens of the United States have grown exceedingly lazy about our part in this democratic republic. We whine and grumble about the government and how supposedly corrupt, inefficient, or misguided it is, but most of us do very little about changing matters.

Even with mail-in ballots and early voting, many people can’t even be bothered to vote — and those of us who do, often decide in a nanosecond whom to vote for. We base our decisions on the 30- or 60-second political advertisements we see on television, on sound bites shown on TV news, on silly slogans plastered in windows and on automobile bumpers.

Things weren’t always this way. Consider, for instance, the debates that took place between Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas and his challenger, future president Abraham Lincoln.

On Oct. 3, 1854, the first day of the Illinois State Fair in Springfield, Douglas spoke to a crowd in the Hall of Representatives. He refused a direct debate with Lincoln, so the next day, Lincoln spoke at the same site. For more than three hours, he discussed slavery and the historical laws governing it before a large crowd that, according to reports, remained attentive despite sweltering heat. Douglas then responded with an impromptu two-hour rebuttal, and the crowd stayed through that as well.

In 1858, the candidates, who were in opposition again, agreed to seven face-to-face encounters around the state. The first one took place in Ottawa, a town of 9,000, but 10,000 people showed up, coming by horse and buggy or on foot. There were no chairs, so they stood for three hours to hear the contenders’ views.

It is difficult today to imagine watching a three-hour political debate on TV in our own comfortable living rooms — much less standing up to see one in person. But those people of the 1850s evidently felt that deciding the future of their state was a serious enough matter that they could put up with a little discomfort.

No such attitude prevails today, by golly! We are all too caught up in shopping for bargains on the Web, traipsing around malls, going out to restaurants, and watching sitcoms to give more than cursory attention to political issues and candidates.

We’re so uninterested, in fact, we don’t even want to figure out who the good and bad incumbents are, so we vote in term limits and have our officials ejected automatically every few years.

And the candidates recognize our laziness. So they give us ads.

But imagine, for a minute, what the presidential campaigns would be like without those glib television spots that attempt to imprint on our brains some simplistic, easily digestible idea (Candidate A is ‘tough on crime’; Candidate B ‘looks to the future’) that might induce us to vote for one contender.

If we didn’t have those carefully scripted, endlessly rehearsed, beautifully filmed capsules of nonsense to tell us who the candidates were — if the presidential hopefuls could no longer be packaged and sold like rock stars in a music video — what would we do? How would we decide whom to vote for?

Why, we’d have to get off our overstuffed sofas and learn about the issues.

We’d have to watch debates on television or in person and demand that the candidates give thorough responses to complicated questions instead of short bursts of rehearsed rhetoric.

We’d have to become well-versed in the problems of our times and savvy enough to distinguish between bland, meaningless rhetoric and honest, well-considered views.

How many people would actually do all this? Quite honestly, I don’t know. Voter participation would probably decline initially, though it might increase as candidates were forced to campaign on relevant issues rather than relying on their ad consultants to win them the election.

But, even if only 5 percent of the citizenry voted, I’d rather have an educated 5 percent casting ballots than 95 percent making decisions based on which candidate has the better ad campaign.

Just think about it: No barrage of commercials, no media analysis of whose ads are more "negative," no requirement that all presidential hopefuls either be millionaires or beholden to special interests that can help them raise moola for the enormous campaign.

I can see no disadvantage, in fact, to simply forbidding political advertising other than the money it would cost some enormous media conglomerates that expect that ad revenue every four years.