COLUMN ONE : Stuck in Politics’ Fast Lane : Voters reflect the hurry-up, sound-bite world of candidates. But in town after town, given the chance, people long to ponder, argue, persuade and be persuaded.

Assigned in August to explore what Americans were thinking about their election, my journey ends today.

I drove 12,450 miles through 27 states from East Coast to Gulf Coast, from Great Lakes to West Coast, rummaged into the lives of 220 Americans and enjoyed shorter conversations with many dozens more.

Often along the way my questions were preceded by a question. Sure, voters would say, come on in, you can have a few hours, a half a day, the run of the town, whatever you need. But first tell us, What are you finding out here?

The answer: America’s epic campaign cavalcade called on voters to engage their mouths and not so much their minds; to utilize their base instincts and rash judgments, not their deliberative, shall we say, humanity.

What was lost along the way? Plenty if you believe that a campaign is when the public is supposed to get close to its democracy. After all, don’t we call it participatory democracy? And if the participants are not enlisted for their thoughtfulness, their charity and complexity, how can the resulting administrators of our democracy be any different, or better?

Maybe without knowing it and almost surely without intending it, voters too often and too easily allowed themselves to be reduced to what they hate about politics.

They have come to think, speak, act and apparently submit to a melodramatic process in which the dialogue is canned, clipped, stale, hyped, poll-driven and straight from the talk shows.

In the ritual, not just the candidates talk in what we disparagingly call sound bites. Voters, too, realized they were expected to hurry up, shout it out, the louder the better, preferably in the simplistic coin of cliche. A dialogue measured in decibels.

In rural North Carolina, I listened to a call-in show on the car radio. The entertainment that afternoon was to see who could rage the loudest against big spenders in Congress.

Goaded on by the emcee, the callers piled on until a good ole boy reached for the brass ring. Why, he thundered, it’s easy enough to complain about Sen. Edward M. Kennedy but Kennedy was no worse a spender than Sen. Jesse Helms. “They’s the same. Won’t waste my gas to vote for any of them.”

If this were simply the nature of Americans, we could stop here.

But given a chance, the voters I met reverted, gratefully so, from emotional clamor to genuine contemplation. Spend a few hours with a family, or a half-day, or even longer, watch them work and play, meet their children, and the transformation was as dependable as it was prodigious.

These are the people, the day after the call-in show, who mobilized fleets of gaily decorated, horn-honking tractor trailers full of clothes, food, lumber and love for those strangers in Florida and Louisiana who were knocked flat by Hurricane Andrew.

“Those people who didn’t like government, they’re the first one’s in line now,” laughed Grace Bush, a volunteer at a hurricane relief Red Cross center in Houma, La. “They ask me where to go. I tell them to go to the government first. Get their name at the top of the list. They go. It’s human nature. Good for them. Nobody should be beyond help.”

Again and again through the weeks, it was plain that we voters are more reflective, less arrogant, more uncertain, more willing to admit and laugh at our contradictions, more apt to face up to our selfishness than we are commonly regarded to be. If only we would be given the chance.

No matter how charged the issue--excepting matters like abortion and the death penalty, which carry moral imperatives of life and death--I found people willing and ready to question themselves and their beliefs, entirely unlike what they are permitted in the hurry-up tempo of political discourse in the 1990s.

“Thank you, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this.” I heard it over and over, the longer we spent, the more we argued, the tougher the questions got.

“Thank you,” said Emmett Shockley. He is a retired school administrator in Las Cruces, N.M., and an activist in the organization known as the American Assn. of Retired Persons. During one long morning, we have been engaged in a discussion on whether elderly Americans are getting more than their fair share of federal benefits.

“Yes, we’re selfish . . . . We see that we’re greedy geezers, and it’s time for us to do something about it,” he said.

Later, at a home in Tempe, Ariz., I talk with members of a black-leather motorcycle club. The door opened and I saw only the barrel of a shotgun. “OK, where is that slimeball reporter?” growls the voice connected to the shotgun.

Ha ha, the voice says next.

The bikers were demonstrating their support for a liberal interpretation of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Particularly 300-pound Ed (Animal) Bassett, who wore the standard black Harley T-shirt and wild hair and beard almost to his waist.

We’ve all heard their worries. Any attempt to regulate gun ownership is a first step . . . and so on. But Animal, it turns out, is a licensed motorcycle driving instructor. As we discuss the issue, I asked him, well what if everybody who wanted to buy a gun had to pass a safety course like motorcyclists? Just so that everybody who bought a gun legally knew how to use it and to safeguard it against misuse?

“Hummm, I could see that,” he said after a pause to think. “At least if it was voluntary.”

Not an earth-moving change of heart, granted. But a change. And a tough group, too, on its home turf. And compare that discussion to your common political stage-show confrontation over gun ownership.

Without attempting to allocate blame--plenty of opportunity for that on your own--let’s say our process seems to have become rigged so that differences among us pile up thick as storm clouds, horizon to horizon, blotting out the light and putting common ground in perpetual darkness. As a result, whoever is elected President, I think, will suffer a stunted mandate and a more cynical, dispirited country.

Where is the patience for honest doubt or the struggle against our own confusion? If not during a campaign, when?

Voters might be asked, what do you think? But they understand the question is not really so much what they can think, but what can they say in a few quick words. What will boil out of them hot on the instant, regardless of its value? The result exaggerates our emotions and compounds the distance between our beliefs.

In Mt. Airy, N.C., Floyd’s Barbershop attracts the tourist trade, thanks to its prominent place on favorite son Andy Griffith’s old television show. Donna George started cutting hair there a while ago. “To tell you honestly, I didn’t expect it when I started, but all these people who come in from other places are just like me. I don’t know why, but I expected they would be different. The only difference is their accents, and they think we got one.”

In this so-called Communication Age, political communication among voters has too much become a collection of impulses, grunts, echoes, yeahs and nays. I might be wrong, but I suspect that a band of prehistoric hairy Neanderthals planned the administration of life in the damp limestone cave with at least as much enlightenment as is allowed by the modern “advance” of instantaneous voter reaction, recorded game-show like by telephone key pad at every debate utterance, and beamed back across the land by proud technicians and social scientists.

After watching the vice presidential debate, a group of students at Northern Arizona University gathered to talk and eat pizza. Leonard Begay, a Navajo and student of public administration, paused to think, paused a long time. And then he spoke softly, carefully.

“For me, having self-respect and respect for others, that’s what I want to see. And don’t. Who is the person that can rule with a caring heart and respect for people . . . ?”

Hard to measure that from the galvanic action on the skin or on the digits of a key pad.

Curiously, our process demands that candidates be challenged on everything said, done and undone. But there is little of the same for the collected views of voters.

Whatever the voters say they want, it is presumed, must be what they want. Often it isn’t. And many Americans are grateful to have their views tested by reasoned argument. Others may not be grateful, but their views beg for challenge nonetheless.

In Reno, Gerald DeVore sat in the basement of the Covenant Church Presbyterian and stewed as he listened to the final televised presidential debate.

He said it feels as if the would-be presidents are pandering to him with promises. “They’re promising things they cannot deliver,” he harrumphed.

So record him as against government spending?

But wait, Jerry, didn’t you just say that you are alive today because of your second $70,000 heart bypass surgery, paid for by Medicare and your retirement insurance?

“Yes . . . In this country, we cannot stop giving,” he said.

So record him as a grateful beneficiary of government spending?

Which is it?

Both, he nodded. And he struggled a bit for an explanation. “We are cynical. But I don’t see what we can do (as a country).”

We are, it seems, a sum of our contradictions.

Our process, perhaps like our society, dwells too deeply on stereotype.

At Custom Video Communications in Ft. Wayne, Ind., owners Bill and Marilyn Moran Townsend dress fashionably, feel th’80s were good to us,” and talk the familiar chilly jargon of business: global competition, growth and profitability. They expect more of all three in the 1990s.

They make training and marketing videos and the like, employ 20 people and staunchly oppose government mandates for such things as family leave and expanded benefits.

Why? The stereotypical answer would be that they think it’s bad business. But in fact, they think such benefits are good business by offering them voluntarily to their workers so they can lure talent away from big-city competitors in Chicago, Detroit and Cincinnati.

They have been featured in newspapers and a textbook as examples of the modern, compassionate and competitive company. They devote each Friday afternoon to showing a movie in the office for employees and their families. They provide an annual budget for an employee “happy committee,” the goal of which, Marilyn explains, is “to see that we never let our fun become work around here.” Some stereotype.

None of this is to deny America its plentiful share of dunderheads to meet along the roads and way-stops. Plenty of them. Bigots, especially, both whisperers and yellers. To these people the issues and characters of the presidential campaign are mere abstraction; as far as I could tell the vote is black and white.

And the toll of this bigotry unaddressed is easy enough to tally.

“I don’t personally think it’s going to get any better as a result of this campaign. White people have instilled in black people’s mind that we’re not anything, that we’re not going to do anything. So why do anything?” said Angie Martin, a student at Virginia Union University.

Nothing in the campaign absorbed so much energy as the frequent attempts to gauge the leanings of voters. Yet, I wonder, are we so deafened by the roar and the clang of campaign machinery that we cannot listen to each other’s curious “whys” when it comes to explaining our preferences?

“I think you have to unify the country first,” said George Wyatt, owner of the Flower Box florist shop in Winnfield, La. Given a chance, he wanted to talk not so much about whom he was for, but what he was for.

“We’ve done gross injustices to large groups of people, like single black mothers. We’ve put a cap on how much they can progress in our economy. We give them benefits but tell them if they get a job, they lose the benefits. The poor aren’t the enemy, they’re trapped.”

Too often, however, the campaign process seems twisted in such a fashion as to make all of us potential enemies of each other.

Few Americans have escaped the long, anxious debate about Washington’s hopeless inability to forge ahead, whichever way ahead might be. A surprising number say only: good.

“At least it’s gridlock. At least it holds things back a little,” says Charles Betts, owner of Betts Cadillac dealership in Des Moines.

Like many Iowans, Betts attributes to himself the best of heartland American values. His father worked hard to build a business, and he worked hard to build on that. And he has done well at it.

As he followed America’s political debate, the choice was brutally simple: The needs of America are great, but the government is in the red.

He looks out to see a nation that argues the matter in expressions of shrill caricature. And who can blame him his fear? In such an atmosphere, best look out for No. 1.

“I stopped listening weeks ago. Because I know. There’s nothing that can be said. I feel I am perceived as someone who has more than his share. At least it’s gridlock. . . . “

Times researchers Tracy Shryer in Chicago and Doug Conner in Seattle assisted with this story, and with the preceding dispatches in the series.