Online stumping? MTV chats? These are not their fathers’ methods of campaigning. Welcome, candidates, to . . . : The New World

When the mass blitz hit two weeks ago, popping the message onto the computer screen of every student at Dartmouth College, the brothers of Alpha Delta paid particular attention.

After all, the e-mail-announced event would be at their fraternity house.

But political observers and operatives will likely find more interest in the missive’s method of delivery--every Dartmouth student must have a computer hard-wired into a central system--and in the sequence of its phrasing: “Be on TV with Tabitha Soren!” it said. “Meet Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole.”

Thirty-five years ago last week, John F. Kennedy gave America its first live, televised presidential news conference.

Twenty-five years ago last July, Congress ratified the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18.

Today, electronic media and politics have fused, and the nation’s youngest voting block, 18 to 24, may be the only one completely comfortable with that confluence.

In an election year in which the GOP has the only real roadshow going, expect more of the same: Conservative candidates will dash from their gigs at evangelical churches to fling themselves into the youth culture like mosh-pit stage divers. And purveyors of pop, criticized from pulpits nationwide, will sing their loud and lascivious siren songs to a new breed of rockin’ young Republicans.

At Dartmouth on Jan. 20, Dole, the front-running candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, gave the 1996 campaign its techno-kickoff. After addressing the fraternity, he climbed aboard MTV’s new, totally wired “Choose or Lose” mobile media bus for an online cyberchat, followed by a rolling interview with reporter Soren.

Off campus, at the Dartmouth Review--a student weekly notorious for what critics see as right-wing recklessness--editor E. Davis Brewer Jr. was shaking off a hangover one afternoon a week before MTV’s arrival.

During winter break, Brewer worked for candidate Steve Forbes. But he also likes commentator Patrick Buchanan’s strong stand on social issues, he said. And he thinks Dole is on target in his withering critique of Hollywood.

“I think our popular culture is in complete decline,” Brewer said, sitting on the ratty couch he’s been sleeping on in a room where a shelf displays rum, vodka and single malt Scotch bottles, and the wall offers portraits of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the pope.

Brewer reconciles his carousing and conservatism with a smile: “I think that a little sin is good for the soul. I don’t think the problems in our country can really be attributed to the fact that some college kids drink too much.”

Over at Alpha Delta, the day before Dole’s appearance, Duff Kuhnert, a 22-year-old chemistry major, sat at a big Macintosh computer beneath a makeshift plywood loft and demonstrated the campuswide network by sending a message to his roommate, Jaime Keeman, who worked on another linked Mac six feet away.

After scrolling through a list of upcoming fraternity parties to an announcement of the upcoming Dole event, Kuhnert clicked into MTV’s America Online site, where that appearance was listed along with news stories about Mariah Carey, Tupac Shakur and rumors of a Sex Pistols reunion.

With their computers crammed into one tiny room, Brewer and Keeman are able to devote a second small living space to the other campus mainstay: an entertainment center.

The preferred channel in the fraternity house is ESPN, they said, but MTV gets its share of viewers too. Clicking on that channel, Kuhnert and Keeman took a moment to watch as bikini-clad young women preened in a segment called “MTV’s Ultimate Winter Vacation.”

Then they went back to their studies and to getting the house ready for Dole.

Students who kept watching into the early morning would have encountered a video by rapper Erick Sermon. In it, a white man in a business suit intimates that he is under “direct orders from Senator Dole.”

What orders? Orders to wipe out Sermon and perhaps all of rap culture, the video jokingly implies.

Such are the odd political and cultural juxtapositions of the Information Age.

In 1992, it struck political handlers as “heretical” when then-Gov. Bill Clinton appeared on the “Arsenio Hall Show” and MTV, recalled Mandy Grunwald, a media advisor for the campaign at the time.

Four years later, she said, that “pop culture strategy” is widely accepted as part of a new political truism: “You can’t reach MTV voters in traditional ways.”

In their book on politics and media, “White House to Your House” (MIT Press, 1995), Edwin Diamond and Robert Silverman describe then-President George Bush’s reluctant, last-minute decision to go the MTV route and be interviewed by Soren in 1992: “He looked,” they wrote, “about as comfortable with Soren as a father talking to his teenage daughter about safe sex.”

Since then, though, more politicians have gotten hip to the culture. And MTV has grown increasingly serious and sophisticated in its coverage.

In 1992, MTV put its viewership at 25 million and reported polls showing that 75% of that audience intended to vote. About 44% of the age group overall showed up, polls showed.

“Anyone who tells you what’s decisive in almost any election is wrong,” Grunwald said. But according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll, 42% of that age group voted for Clinton, 36% for Bush and 21% for Ross Perot. About a quarter labeled themselves either liberal or conservative, while half said they were middle of the road.

But the most recent Times poll, taken last October, showed that the same age group had even more discontent than the population at large, with 73% saying they would not vote for Clinton again. Then again, 62% also said they were unlikely to support the Republican congressional leadership.

Earlier this month, MTV’s new 45-foot bus rolled out of New York City en route to Dartmouth on the first leg of a campaign-long tour of the nation.

Somewhere near the Connecticut border, executive producer Dave Sirulnick invited a print reporter into the state-of-the-art editing facility in the rear and slapped in one of the network’s first pieces of campaign coverage.

Scheduled to air this week, it’s a video profile of a young volunteer in the Buchanan campaign. The segment is shot in a scratch-style, rockumentary format, with lots of graphic overlays, music and odd camera angles that will dizzy devotees of the C-SPAN single camera technique. But it captures an essence of the campaign process that other media miss. And young people are drawn to it--the sort of endlessly twitching media they’ve known since their crib days.

At the bus’ first stop, a shakedown event at Fairfield University in Connecticut, MTV’s young crew went to work like rock band roadies, putting quivering silver stars atop the bus and setting up electronic equipment.

Then, as Dr. Dre and Bush (the band) thumped from big speakers and dancers did their obligatory rock-and-rap video writhing on two monitors, students gathered in an icy New England fog.

Steered by representatives from the Santa Monica-based group Rock the Vote, some registered while others recorded their views on interactive electronic kiosks that also photographed their faces for possible use on MTV.

Asked to list the issues that most concern her, Marion Barone, 21, touched “violence” and “welfare,” on the computer screen, making little check marks appear in boxes. Then she typed in “gender issues.”

If her liberal politics are linked to media, she said, it’s a reverse influence: “My parents always hated MTV. We couldn’t watch it. They thought it was all George Michael singing, ‘I want your sex.’ ”

Besides the kiosks, MTV’s efforts to raise political awareness include a colorful voters guide, which volunteers handed out aggressively.

Produced with the help of Rock the Vote, the guide offers nonpartisan analysis of the issues, from affirmative action to the environment, always from the perspective of youth.

The abortion page begins, “Most of the women who receive abortions in America are young: 55% are under 25, and 21% are teenagers.”

Another section points out that “according to a 1995 MTV survey, young people are more concerned about crime and violence than any other issue. Gunshot wounds are the second-leading cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 34. . . .”

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If Dartmouth and Fairfield are any indication, students today seem at least as well-informed on politics as the general populace.

For instance, as the MTV bus stirred things up outside, a cluster of Fairfield students sat in the university center talking not about politics but “Baywatch.” Between them, the dozen students could identify six of the Republican candidates--probably better than a random group of older adults would do.

But asked to make a presidential choice between Bob Dole and that “Baywatch” star they’d been discussing earlier, their shouted response was nearly unanimous: “David Hasselhoff!”

Not that they were serious.

But John Orman, a professor at the school, suggests that such attitudes reflect an underlying reality: For the MTV generation, politics is just another ingredient in the great cultural stew.

“Young people treat politicians as celebrities,” said Orman, who has written several books on the presidency and is updating his 1984 book, “The Politics of Rock Music” (Nelson-Hall).

“It’s one big mix on television. Clinton is just another face young people encounter as they channel surf from MTV to Oprah to Rush Limbaugh.”

The MTV bus itself is an apt symbol of that. Worked into the bus’ disjointed red, white and blue flag motif are a wild tangle of quotations.

Some come from the political mainstream--George Santayana, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Alexis de Tocqueville: “Among democratic nations, each new generation is a new people.”

But mixed into the verbal melee are an equal number of quotes from pop culture icons such as Alanis Morissette, Naughty by Nature, the Beastie Boys, Megadeth, Snoop Doggy Dogg and LL Cool J: “How weird do things have to get before you register and vote?”

It’s that fusion of pop and politics, media and message, that unsettles some.

The late Allan Bloom’s best-selling book “The Closing of the American Mind” (Simon & Schuster, 1987) is something of a sacred text among many social conservatives. Its most frequently discussed chapter is an intricate diatribe against what to Bloom is the inherently soul-depleting nature of rock music generally, MTV in particular.

“In short,” he said of those overlapping media, “life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”

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As the pop culture critique moves out of academia and into politics, however, delicate questions will inevitably arise about just whose fantasies are acceptable.

With Dole securely captive on MTV’s explosively painted bus as it rolled from the Dartmouth frat house to an Elks Club, MTV reporter Soren--now a Gen X celeb herself--pushed the candidate into a discussion of this conflict.

Why, for instance, did he criticize such African American groups as 2 Live Crew and the Geto Boys but not country star Johnny Cash, whose lyrics include: “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”?

Dole smiled and acknowledged the disparity.

Later, Soren asked the 72-year-old Dole, who was recently endorsed by singer Pat Boone, about another aspect of the phenomenon:

“My boss talked to a lot of people outside at your event, and they were saying, you know, ‘We go to Nine Inch Nails concerts, we party, we have fun, we live sort of a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, but we’re conservatives politically, and it seems like the politicians don’t understand that those two can merge.’

“Do you feel like the Republicans can [include] . . . the wild kids who have nothing to do with the Christian Coalition?”

Before she could finish that last phrase, Dole interjected: “Oh, no doubt about it.”