IF YOU paid a surprise visit to the Washington bureau of a large European newspaper a couple of weeks before the presidential election, what could you reasonably expect? Excitement, action, a feverish rush to beat the deadline? Well, last week you would have been mightily disappointed.

What you would have seen instead was the bureau chief, her secretary and three reporters, lined up like viewers in an art gallery, backs to the door, gazing up at old news pages framed on the wall.

These were souvenirs from campaign 92 that enchanted time when George Bush, the mighty incumbent, was waking up to the country boy from Rope and a wild card named Perot; that dream like period when a nation began to sense the passing of the flame to a new generation and anything seemed possible.

And at this particular Washington bureau, that was a time when the secretary's mother took to ferrying coffee and sandwiches to the staff in the early hours to remind them to eat. There was little sleep and little time for it anyway. They survived on adrenalin.

This time, they can hardly stay awake. The passion is dead. Apathy reigns. The only question hanging in the air is whether America's nonvoters will make history on Tuesday by outnumbering the voters. It could happen.

Even in a vintage year like 1992, only 55 per cent of voters turned out. Four years before when George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, the non voters missed victory by a scratch when 49.9 per cent of them stayed at home. Come Tuesday, in this most apathetic of years, they could actually pull it off.

According to a recent survey only 24 per cent of those questioned said they were following the election very closely, compared with 42 per cent in 1992. Television audiences for the presidential debates were down nearly 20 per cent.

Network news coverage of the campaign in September dropped 40 per cent from 1992 while the number of front page stories in the Washington Post was down by half.

As for the vice presidential debate featuring Gore and Kemp, the potential candidates for 2000, it attracted half the audience of its counterpart four years before and lost out hopelessly to the hoopla surrounding the 12 year old baseball fan who leaned over the railing at Yankee Stadium, caught the ball and gave the Yankees a gift home run.

Meanwhile, Bob Dole, the only serious challenger for the world's most powerful political office, failed even to get a spot on Oprah.

Then again, the Dole camp always seemed criminally short of inspiration. In Ohio, for example, when Bill and Al's carnival came to town, the Dole camp's response was to wheel out a bunch of volunteers dressed as "the Gore trees", the idea being to remind voters that Al Gore is a treebugger.

In fact, the only real excitement generated by Bob Dole was when he toppled over the edge of a stage.

NOTHING seemed to work for him, not even his attempts at a snappy mused campaign song. Bemused fans had just got used to him rocking along at campaign stops to Dole Man, when the copyright owners of the original, Soul Man threatened to sue for $100,000 every time the song was played and promptly ended those happy interludes.

Next up was Bruce Springsteen, who wrote to his former hometown paper in New Jersey objecting to Dole's appropriation of Born in the USA, adding for good measure that he wasn't a Republican.

After that poor Bob reached for a snappy anti drug slogan only to find himself at the nasty end of Nike's lawyers, though why they bothered is a mystery. "Just don't do it" never had much of a ring to it anyway, but after much learned discussion no doubt, Nike decided that the slogan was too similar to, if the direct opposite of, its own "Just do it".

Then to cap it all, Bob upset Bozo the clown.

"Please get Bozo out of the White House," begged a pole supporter at a campaign stop, to which Bob obligingly replied: "Bozo's on his way out". Next day Washington was ablaze with Republican lapel buttons reading "Bye Bye Bozo". Now that was catchy. And safe . . . surely? Nope.

Within hours the original Bozo, Larry Harmon, was out of his box bleating: "It irks me when people use the character's name in a demeaning way. .. It's like attacking motherhood and apple pie, for heaven's sake."

Who could blame Bob and his campaign workers for feeling a little paranoid? Alter all, did anyone sue the Democrats for their head banging repetition of the Macarena at the Chicago convention, asked one Dole man, only half joking?

No. Point proven. Well, not entirely. Several times a day, floods of incredibly offensive and personal material is published about US politicians day in, day out.

It is expected from the talk show hosts: they are obliged to savage someone every night. After one presidential debate, David Letterman cracked on CBS that negotiations got bogged down over whether or not President Clinton should be allowed to bring a date".

On NBC, Jay Leno quipped that "Bill Clinton remained faithful to his wife for the entire 90 minutes." But it gets a lot more serious than that. In a recent edition of the Washington Times, for example, a three quarter page advertisement for a book about Clinton linked the First Couple to cocaine smuggling and a "peculiar pattern" of deaths of people close to them.

Not only that, they were accused of "shameless sponging off taxpayers" as well as "tax fraud, obstruction of justice and lying to government agencies (for starters)". Lest this failed to grab you, an airing was also given to "his adulteries, and hers".

On the same day, a full page ad for another book, only this time on Ross Perot, appeared in the New York Times, accusing him of using his staff "to collect dirt on rivals from prostitutes" and of running spying operations on his own employees.

MEANWHILE, Dole's camp was forced to withdraw a television commercial which charged that there were more investigations, prosecutions and convictions [in the Clinton White House] than any administration in over two decades".

Journalists demanded that it name names, whereupon officials started to count and realised that the Reagan administration had produced many more indictments and convictions than the Clintonites.

Still, no one apparently even crooks a little finger at the likes of Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform who gets away with saying things like: Clinton's is the most corrupt administration in US history. His friends are criminals and, in his personal life, he treats women like a spittoon."

Meanwhile, Gennifer Flowers the original "bimbo eruption" popped up in a "Where are they now" segment in George magazine to make the modest claim that she "probably" got Bill Clinton elected. "He wasn't a front runner when my story became national news. Afterwards he was a household name." (Interesting strategy for anyone brave enough to try it.)

Stories from the lesser campaigns around the US, for the Senate and Congress, tell of equally robust tactics. In Virginia, Republican Senator John Warner's media consultant was found to have doctored a photograph of Warner's opponent by superimposing his head on someone else's body.

In California, a vicious television commercial for a Republican congressman, Frank Riggs, featured footage of Richard Allan Davis, California's recently convicted and most notorious murderer, who sexually assaulted and killed 12 year old Polly Klaas.

The picture then cut to the Democrat challenger, Michela Alioto, and a voiceover saying she is opposed to the death penalty. Message received.

Meanwhile, Alioto has had to do some apologising of her own after her brother was caught sending forged faxes on a television company's stationery to Riggs's headquarters asking for details of the Republican strategy.

On the whole, Americans seem fairly immune to it all and can look back on a fine, long standing tradition of mudslinging of a kind that puts our pathetic attempts to shame. President William Howard Taft was once described by Theodore Roosevelt as "a fathead [with] an intellect a little short of a guinea pig".

John Quincy Adams was called "the pimp" for allegedly procuring a young American girl for the Russian tsar. And the press routinely called Andrew Jackson's mother "a common prostitute" and his wife "a convicted adulteress". When Jackson's wife died just after his election in 1828, he blamed it on the rumour mongers.