COLUMN LEFT/ GEORGE BLACK : Which Elvis? So Which Bill, Which George? : The Postal Service points a way out of the dilemma of image-driven politics.

There are so many reasons to celebrate the news of a special stamp dedicated to Elvis Presley that it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, it’s not just any stamp, but the 29-cent variety, to grace tens of millions of pieces of regular, everyday, first-class mail.

The fact that an Elvis stamp is being issued at all is, in a sense, a parable of participatory democracy in action. For its release will be the climax of a huge public letter-writing campaign that started nine years and five postmasters ago and took 60,000 letters to achieve its goal.

Now that democratic principle is to be taken a step further. On April 1, the U.S. Postal Service will distribute 5 million ballots to post offices across the nation. For the cost of a 19-cent stamp, the public will be able to vote for one of two images of the King, who died in 1977. The first shows the young Elvis, circa 1957, with camel-hair jacket, greased cowlick hanging over his forehead. The second is the fuller-figured performer of the mid-1970s (the Postal Service calls this “the contemporary Elvis,”) in full pompadour, mutton-chop sideburns and high-collar white jumpsuit, with the barbiturate bloat tastefully downplayed.

As much as any index of consumer confidence, the voters’ choice will reveal important truths about Americans’ state of mind at this moment of floundering national self-esteem. Personally, I’d have thought it was an open-and-shut case in favor of the rakish young Memphis truck driver, who opened up mainstream tastes to black music and had an impact on the sleepwalking psyche of the middle Eisenhower years comparable to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. But therein lies the beauty of democracy: Let the ballot box determine whether others equate sophistication with a night at the Las Vegas Hilton, where Elvis played 839 sold-out shows.

The Elvis vote is also a straw in the wind for students of the U.S. electoral system. Big government, in the shape of the Postal Service, is to be applauded for its commitment to democracy, but the private sector knows that Americans are too impatient to wait for the delayed gratification of a month-long postal vote. So a number of media, even the Washington Post, have set up their own call-in ballots. Some are using the 900-number system that is already a staple of the kind of democracy-by-plebiscite that was used to such good effect by tabloid TV during the Clarence Thomas hearings.

It may now be time to apply the Elvis paradigm more widely. To replace all those uncomfortable November hours spent pulling levers in drafty polling places, the whole electoral process could be streamlined by introducing the touch-tone vote. A national election, which allows for economies of scale, ought to be able to keep the costs of a call under a dollar a minute.

The Elvis principle also suggests a way out of the dilemma of image-driven politics: how to vote in good conscience for a man who appears to have changed his views radically over time or to espouse contradictory messages. One would not simply vote for Bill Clinton, for example. Press an additional button on your touch-tone phone, and choose between the young Clinton who opposed the Vietnam War on moral grounds, or the pudgier, fortysomething Clinton who symbolizes the drift of the Democratic Party into the neo-liberal center. Republicans could opt for George Bush the macho conservative, who belted out hits like “Read My Lips” and “Desert Storm,” or the older man, a little slowed by Halcion, who prefers to croon easy-listening standards.

Tocqueville had a point when he noted that “the ablest men in the United States are rarely placed at the head of affairs.” Perhaps, then, it is time to acknowledge this peculiarity of American democracy, bow to public apathy about the current crop of candidates and vote instead for entertainer surrogates.

Elvis, unfortunately, is no longer with us (at least that’s what most of us believe, according to the polls). But the same populist activism that launched the Elvis stamp could also be used to draft, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger--assuming the problem of his foreign birth could be overcome. The man did, after all, draw consistently larger and more enthusiastic crowds in the New Hampshire primaries than the President.

Even here, the nuances of personality would have to be built in to our new touch-tone democracy: Voters might be offered a choice between the cuddly hunk of “Kindergarten Cop” and the deranged killing machine of “Terminator 2.” But as Tocqueville also told us, one of the most vibrant features of democracy in America is precisely this ceaseless appetite for variety.