The last time the nomination of a vice presidential candidate was anything but ceremonial came in 1956, when presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson decided to leave it to convention delegates to choose his running mate. Senators Estes Kefauver and John F. Kennedy emerged as the chief contenders, with Kefauver (who had lost out to Stevenson for both the 1952 and '56 Democratic presidential nominations) winning out.

Technically, however, there was -- fleetingly -- a contested race for the vice presidential nomination at the 1992 convention, when onetime Massachusetts governor Endicott "Chubb" Peabody arrived at the convention after waging a symbolic campaign for the vice presidency during that year's presidential primaries. Peabody believed that the VP slot was too important to be decided by the presidential nominee and succeeded in placing non-binding vice presidential beauty contests on several states' primary ballots. (Typically, he was the only candiate on the ballot in these states.) At the convention, Peabody had himself nominated for vice president and used his speech to plead for a change in the VP selection process. But he also stressed that his efforts were meant merely to draw attention to the issue -- and not to oppose Al Gore, who had been chosen by Bill Clinton before the convention to serve as his running mate. At the conclusion of his speech, Peabody withdrew his nomination and endorsed Gore, who was then nominated by acclamation.

"Speaking for myself, and at least for this coming election, this is one Arizona tradition I'd like to see continue," she said.

Not a bad line. Of course, the track record for presidential candidates from Barack Obama's Illinois isn't much better than for those from John McCain's Arizona:

* Adlai Stevenson twice served as the Democratic presidential nominee, suffering lopsided defeats to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 (442-89 in the Electoral College) and 1956 (by a 457-73 spread).

* U.S. Representative Phil Crane sought the 1980 Republican nomination, but dropped out after finishing with just 1.8 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary.

* U.S. Representative John B. Anderson also sought the G.O.P. nomination in 1980 - and also failed. The moderate-to-liberal Anderson then bolted the party and ran as an independent, finishing with 5.7 million votes, or about 7 percent.

* Senator Paul Simon ran for the Democratic nomination in 1988. He finished in second place in Iowa and third place in New Hampshire and ended his campaign shortly after scoring a symbolic victory in his home state.

* Carol Moseley Braun waged a quixotic bid for the 2004 Democratic nomination, but her bid to become the first woman president failed to take off and she dropped out prior to the Iowa caucuses.

So that's two more presidential losers from Illinois than from Arizona. Of course, there was this guy named Lincoln...

If Barack Obama were to choose Edwards, it would create an unusual situation in American politics. Very rarely does a losing vice presidential nominee land on someone else's ticket in a future election. Edwards would be the fourth person ever to do this, and the first since 1916.

The others:

Thomas Hendricks, the Democratic governor of Indiana first ran as Samuel Tilden's running mate in the 1876 election. The Tilden-Hendricks ticket actually won the popular vote, but Republican Rutherford Hayes maneuvered his way to a controversial 185-184 victory in the Electoral College. Hendricks sat out the 1880 election, but was chosen in 1884 as Grover Cleveland's running mate. The Democrats narrowly defeated Maine's James Blaine in the general election, but the 66-year-old Hendricks died eight months after taking office.

Adlai Stevenson I was a congressman from Illinois when the Democrats nominated him to run with Grover Cleveland in 1892, when Cleveland was seeking to reclaim the White House after a four-year absence. Stevenson was placed on the ticket to appease the party base, and he and Cleveland went on to defeat incumbent Republican Benjamin Harrison and his running mate, Whitelaw Reid, in the fall. But when Cleveland stepped aside in 1896, Democrats snubbed Stevenson at their convention and instead nominated the charismatic William Jennings Bryan for president. Bryan lost to William McKinley but emerged again in 1900 as the Democratic nominee and – with most prominent Democrats unwilling to run for VP in what seemed to a be a doomed election for their party – turned to Stevenson as a way of uniting the party base.

Charles Fairbanks was chosen in 1904 to run with Theodore Roosevelt on the Republican ticket in what proved to be one of the more uneventful general elections in American history, with Roosevelt and Fairbanks trouncing Democrats Alton B. Parker and Henry Gassaway Davis (at 81, the oldest person ever nominated for national office by a major party). Roosevelt essentially chose his own successor in 1908, but passed over Fairbanks for William Howard Taft. Fairbanks reemerged in 1916, though, when he was tapped to run with Charles Evans Hughes, who very nearly unseated Woodrow Wilson.

One other name could also be on this list is Rufus King, who represented New York in the Senate and who was the Federalist Party's nominee for VP in both 1804 and 1808, losing both elections. But unlike the others on this list, King ran both times with the same presidential nominee, Charles Pinckney.

Yes, I confess, it's all so much palaver now. That piece I wrote four years ago about the unseen importance of conventions-they serve a vital role as a meeting place for party delegates from across the country-now seems quaint and naïve. My insistence that television owes citizens better coverage seems deplorably earnest. After watching John Kerry's stilted salute and George W. Bush's macho posturing and Zell Miller's public breakdown (well, at least there was some psychodrama there), after suffering through more bad lies than a 35-handicapper at Pebble Beach, I'm ready to retire from the convention-watching business, and I hope the deputy vice chairs for balloon-dropping and other convention organizers are ready to do the same.

Four years from now, let the candidates accept their nominations by e-mail, or in a television studio (which is basically what the modern convention hall is anyway). After all, candidate appearances at conventions are a newfangled thing, relatively speaking, dating back only to 1932, when that publicity hound Franklin Roosevelt flew to Chicago to accept his nomination in person. And if a few Congressmen, Senators and national party bosses insist on gathering for a four-day party where they can eat and drink at the expense of corporations in search of government contracts, well, why leave Washington, D.C.?

It's not just the vapid and increasingly hate-filled speeches that have me zigging where once I zagged. It's the non-debate over issues-party platforms are written out of public view and are passed, unread, as a mere housekeeping matter. It's no wonder that nobody save true believers bothers to watch. Walter Cronkite once called convention coverage a national civics lesson, but that was back in the 1960's and early 70's, when platforms meant something and when, by the way, the media actually considered convention coverage a civic obligation. Now, of course, instead of Walter Cronkite we have Jon Stewart, who mocks the conventions of politics and politicians to the delight of a generation trained to believe that nothing really matters anyway. It's an odd sentiment at a time when the Western world is threatened by 21st-century barbarians, but, like, what-ever .

That confrontation with terrorism, by the way, also argues against continuing the archaic practice of gathering thousands of politicians, journalists and hangers-on in close quarters every four years. Security was a nightmare in New York and promises to be the same, or even worse, for many years to come. Can other cities even begin to undertake the kind of security operation the New York Police Department, with its vast resources, experience and manpower, carried out last week? Indeed, why would some cities that held conventions in the recent past-Kansas City, San Diego, Atlanta, New Orleans, Philadelphia-want them back?

The great American political convention has served its purpose and now deserves an honorable place as part of the nation's past. Instead of meeting every four years on a grand scale, the Republicans and Democrats ought to consider the British approach to collective deliberation. The Tories and Laborites gather every year for four days along the southern English coast for party conferences that actually manage to produce debate, generate news and even inspire some excitement. The scale is not quite as huge, although Conservative Party spokeswoman Natalie Kirby said that as many as 10,000 party members and elected officials may attend. That's more than double the number of delegates who came to New York last week.

Because the conferences are about issues rather than nominations, they don't attract 15,000 media members, which means the proceedings are not about production values and sound bites. Tony Blair's Labor Party will meet in Brighton later this month, while the Conservatives will gather in October in Bournemouth. Time will be set aside for debates and question-and-answer sessions, with rank-and-file party members given the opportunity to ask questions and even voice opinions. A far cry, indeed, from what we saw in Boston and New York.

The correlation is not quite precise, but you get the idea. Conventions are history. The question is: What comes next?

But as to his particular religious practice, Bill Bradley has nothing to say, even as several journalists have pressed him on the subject and the two parties' front-runners announce that they're runnin' with Jesus. As a secularized Jew, I find Mr. Bradley's position brave and intriguing. For I have the impression that he's no longer a Christian.

Certainly, Bill Bradley was a Christian once. He calls Presbyterianism "the religious faith of my youth." And he spent years in his early 20's proselytizing others as a fundamentalist athlete.

But what is he now? Bill Bradley won't say. He won't say where he worships, or if he worships. And when The Washington Post published a searching series on Mr. Bradley's life last month, he turned aside religious questions. "Everything I'm going to say about it, I've said in writing," he said four times, with slight variations, during the Post reporters' interviews.

Fair enough. I read Bill Bradley's last book, the splendid memoir, Time Present, Time Past . (The dirty secret is that he's a better writer than a politician.) It shows someone who is, to use the New Age cliché, highly evolved, a seasoned worldly man who in his mid-50's has come out the chastened end of the "money/pleasure syndrome" with a strong sense of faith. Mr. Bradley's unrelenting tone–you hear it in his speeches, too–is one of humility and sincerity, as when he praises his agent in his acknowledgments for bringing him "deals too generous for me to accept."

Mr. Bradley's spirituality seems to have taken many steps away from the Christian faith of his youth. Jesus Christ only shows up as someone with whom, 30 years ago, Bill Bradley had "convinced" himself that he had had a "'personal experience.'" (His quotation marks, his dripping irony.) He is contemptuous of the notion of a "distant God," reverent toward Native American pantheist belief, and now and then trails along in the shadow of Zen master (and coach) Phil Jackson.

While he makes it plain that he believes in some divinity far larger than us, Mr. Bradley's book is so cleansed of reference to church as playing any positive role as to suggest that Bill Bradley is suspicious of organized religion. For instance, when in his preface Mr. Bradley describes the values crisis in this gluttonous materialistic society, he laments the loss of a great many institutions: the two-parent family, the P.T.A., the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts and on to employer loyalty, politeness and so forth. But there is simply no reference in this long (and conservative) list to the breakdown of organized religion. Mr. Bradley seems to regard that as a neutral trend. Indeed, the "arrogance" of majority religion seems to resonate for him with the arrogance of majority culture. He refers to whites as Caucasians. He describes crustless white-bread sandwiches as "ethnic food."

His spiritual vocabulary is modern. He speaks of a struggle, a journey, a "passage," of "variant religious experiences full of ecstasy." There's reverence for Sioux rituals and the polyglot spirituality of the Pequod. And an air (one I and many other privileged people share) of having abandoned the rituals of youth as too narrow. "Powerful psychological forces" made the young Bill Bradley too respectful of authority, he notes ruefully. His religious practice would seem to be New Age or syncretist or multicultural.

"If you choose faith, then you move beyond ritual to a search for your own individual path," he says.

What all this says to me is that he is no longer a Christian–in the same sense that religiously speaking, it would be dishonest for me to say that I'm Jewish. Not that he's anti-Christian. But that he's moved past a belief in the divinity of Jesus. (This is, by the way, quite different from the other challenger, John McCain, whose book Faith of My Fathers isn't especially spiritual but when it is invokes a distant patriarchal god. Bill Bradley's God has died and gone not to heaven but to earth. He seems to exist in all of us.)

I could be wrong. "He hasn't said that [he's left Christianity] to me," said Rabbi Michael Lerner, who has had discussions with the candidate. Dale Russakoff, one of two Washington Post reporters who spent months researching Mr. Bradley's life, reminds me of his commitment to privacy. "Based on what I learned reporting, I think if he were or were not Christian, you wouldn't know it today," she said. "Because he was exposed to a macabre amount of attention when he was young and is now committed to keeping certain things private. Also because he seems to feel regret about using what he calls his 'well-knownness' to save souls in his youth." The soul, Ms. Russakoff said, is in Mr. Bradley's view a private terrain.

But let's assume I'm right, he's not a Christian. Is it anyone's business? Does it have political consequences?

"His position is perfectly acceptable. Religion is a personal matter," Ed Koch said. Mr. Lerner, of Tikkun magazine, said, "He's doing a service to us all by drawing the line. I think it's not a private matter whether he has a spiritual concern about the world that shapes his view of public policy. Love and caring and an ethical consciousness should supplement the focus on money and power. But the specific spiritual community from which those values derive and what your connection to that community is should be a private matter."

Paul Taylor of the Alliance for Better Campaigns, who as a reporter asked Gary Hart the adultery question 12 years ago, agrees: "The two areas of one's personal life in which there's a public interest are health and wealth. I don't think there's a pretext for a reporter to ask the question, Are you a Christian? Of course when a candidate uses deeply personal experiences to talk about the reason he has certain views, he invites some scrutiny. But I couldn't see asking Bradley about this in a press conference- type setting."

Religious matters may play a role in the race, even on the Democratic side. George Bush has declared, shamelessly and stupidly, that his idea of a great political leader is Jesus Christ. With the same vacancy of spirit, Al Gore has announced that he is born-again. They seem to be girding up for a holy war.

Religion may already be a factor in the race, said Michael Barone, the author of The Almanac of American Politics . "Not explicitly," he said. But the difference between Al Gore and Bill Bradley's descriptions of their commitment could help Mr. Bradley in the early going, in Northern states and California, then hurt him on March 14, when the South begins to vote.

"I believe I've seen Gore ask, 'What Would Jesus Do?' W.W.J.D. That language works for him," Mr. Barone said. Indeed, Vice President Gore's Jesusing may help explain why polls show him with a 2-to-1 advantage over Mr. Bradley among black voters.

Meantime, Bill Bradley's subtle and enlightened views of commitment could help him with secularized voters like me in California and New York. "These people dislike the politicians making a big show of their religion," Mr. Barone says. "It's a large vote in the Democratic primary and those people, without really knowing what Bradley's opinions are, probably find his nonwillingness to come forward encouraging."

Mr. Bradley's secularism is a throwback to other great statesmen who did not wear observance on their sleeve. Mr. Barone cites Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson said he was a Unitarian, which was the 1950's equivalent of saying you are on your own individual spiritual path.

Stevenson's lack of belief didn't disqualify him in the 50's, Mr. Barone said, and a Jew could become President today. "Jewish people in politics say I'm wrong, but I think they're paranoid and wrong." All the same, if Mr. Bradley were not a Christian, and people knew it, it could cost him a "few points," Mr. Barone said. And candidates rarely do things that would cost them a few points.

I think this explains Bill Bradley's opacity. He is too genuine a person to disguise his faith, but he stays quiet about the flavor of his practice because it seems like a liability. "I want to come to a time in history where we can explore our religious differences and have that be safe," Mr. Lerner said. "But it doesn't feel safe to most people yet today. Maybe when we've had 100 years of no one being persecuted for religious belief."

Both Vice President Gore and Governor Bush, he added, "have crossed the line." They've "been pandering to their perception of the demands of their right wing. And that's very dangerous. If belief in Jesus ought to be counted on one's behalf in running for public office, then any Jew is going to be disadvantaged as well as someone from any other religious tradition or one who doesn't identify with a religious tradition."

I wish I could say that America is better than that, and that Bill Bradley will be able to prove it. Unfortunately, he now seems poised to demonstrate a different lesson, the limits of thoughtfulness in politics.

If we are to believe book publishers, American readers are lining up at bookstores, wallets in hand, ravenously hungry for fat books about ladies from high society; whether the women scrambled there by romantic liaison or marriage or were born into monogrammed sheets doesn't seem to matter. In the past four years, there have been memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, social histories, reminiscences and other literary exercises about Slim Keith, Pamela Harriman, Evalyn Walsh McLean, Clare Boothe Luce and the Cushing sisters, three Massachusetts girls who collected among them the choice surnames Mortimer, Paley, Roosevelt, Whitney and Astor. (Coming soon: biographies of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Lady Caroline Blackwood.) Sure, they all seemed to be married to Leland Hayward at one time or another.

Sure, some of them are worth the pulp, the printing, the binding. But should we care each and every time a woman is born into a well-positioned family and then proves how down-to-earth she is by (a) holding down a job or (b) doing something more than picking out china patterns for the rest of her natural life? For, in fact, behaving like the rest of humanity? And does Vanity Fair have to excerpt each and every one? The latest offering is a 447-pager titled No Regrets: The Life of Marietta Tree , a fleetingly intriguing but ultimately frustrating biography of the American socialite and political activist.

Marietta Tree was born in 1917 into what author Caroline Seebohm describes as the famously frigid Peabody family of Massachusetts. Ms. Seebohm cites a 1934 cartoon in The New Yorker that pretty much sums up the genes: "I never knew your mother very well, son," says a father. "You see, she was a Peabody." Marietta's grandfather was the very upright headmaster of Groton, and her father, Malcolm, an Episcopalian minister and a withdrawn parent. As a child, she was taught the golden social rule of her clan: Never use the "d" words-death, disease or domestics-in conversation. Unfortunately, because Marietta's parents spent so much time ministering to their Philadelphia Main Line flock, the children found the parental warmth and affection they lacked in the very same "domestics" they weren't allowed to mention in conversation. Ms. Seebohm-also the author of The Man Who Was 'Vogue': The Life and Times of Condé Nast and other, fluffier fare like English Country and The Last Romantics -doesn't throw a lot of Freudian kerfuffle into the mix, but it might have been useful in interpreting Marietta's insecurities and later lack of bonding with her siblings, children and husbands.

After a classic East Coast WASP upbringing (boarding schools, debutante parties, Maine summers, a year of finishing in Italy), Marietta married Desmond FitzGerald (who later helped to found the C.I.A.) and gave birth to Frances FitzGerald, who went on to become a distinguished war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author (for her book about Vietnam, Fire in the Lake ). But Desie went off to World War II, and the striking, tall Marietta-in between her job as a researcher at Life and a hyperactive social life that involved Rockefellers, Warburgs, Paleys and full-time cooks and nannies-fell in love with John Huston. When the hapless Desie returned, he discovered that not only had his beautiful young wife given away some of his clothes, but she announced that she was leaving him for the director John Huston. Desie suggested counseling. She conceded. He asked her to quit her job. She resisted. They struggled along for a few months until she did eventually leave him, though not for Huston. Ronald Tree was a conservative Anglo-American and former Conservative member of the English Parliament who presided over a huge estate Over There. Needless to say, Tree was loaded.

Marietta married Ronald and his millions and moved, with 4-year-old daughter Frankie in tow, to England to become the chatelaine of Ditchley, a drafty, formal place that had been arduously decorated by his former wife of 25 years, Nancy. Marietta and Ronald had a child, Penelope, who grew up to be a splashy teenage supermodel.

Eventually, in between dinners with Winston Churchill and Princess Margaret and failed attempts at fitting in with conservative British society, Marietta lost interest in Ronald. At heart, she was a born-and-bred Yankee limousine liberal; she encouraged Ronald to move back to New York. They kept a fully staffed estate in Barbados and a town house on East 79th Street. She began an affair with Adlai Stevenson while working on his unsuccessful Presidential bids, a relationship for which she was rewarded with the position of U.S. delegate to the Human Rights Commission for the United Nations in 1961. She campaigned for civil rights; even her upright mother sat in protest at segregated lunch counters in the South and was arrested. (Marietta called the Governor of Florida and asked him to treat her mother nicely in prison.)

Ronald, desperate for affection after his wife snubbed him so publicly for so long with her paramour Stevenson, took up with a young man, Michael Teague, and traveled with him around the world. Marietta and Ronald's marriage mended slightly only after Stevenson's death. After Ronald's death in 1976, she became intimate with Richard Llewelyn-Davies, an architect and urban planner, and worked closely with him until her death from cancer in 1991.

Because of her sparkling personality and wit-and doubtless because she was a presentable, intelligent woman-she was in heavy demand as a board member (serving CBS and Pan American Airways, among others) and was a consulting editor for Architectural Digest ; Ms. Seebohm tries to use these positions as evidence of Marietta's status as a sort of protofeminist. She doesn't succeed. What set Marietta apart from other women of her era and class is that she did work-as a researcher, as a U.N. delegate, as an urban planner, but that just isn't enough anymore. Much like Pamela Harriman, with whom she was often compared, Marietta defined herself too often through the men she was intimate with, slipping without question into the politically conservative English landscape with Conservative Ronald, or dabbling in politics with the liberal Stevenson.

Ms. Seebohm's dutiful prose sometimes wanders off into a la-la land of metaphors and similes. For example, she writes about Marietta's affair with Stevenson that Marietta "stocked the Stevenson refrigerator, organized his social life. Thus did domesticity arise like a soufflé between them, embracing them in its frothy warmth." But, gee, who will take the soufflé out of the oven , you might think to yourself as you read, and when will it fall?

Ms. Seebohm informs us in her breathless introduction that Marietta's life was about sex, class and death. But she writes often throughout the book that Marietta was not a sensual person, that because of her chilly upbringing, she was not comfortable being sexual or emotional, even in love letters. As far as the issue of class goes, it was a nonissue: Marietta was born into the stolid bulwarks of the upper middle class, a roost from which she did not budge during her lifetime. And she died alone, refusing to reveal the serious nature of her cancer to anyone: "She was not going to go out lying on pink, fluffed up pillows, receiving the bouquets of acquaintances and the tears of relatives and old beaux. Such sentiment was not for her." Her death was not stoic so much as it was sad.

But the book's biggest problem is its title. No Regrets ? Marietta was a woman who rued not spending enough time with her children; who never received enough affection from her parents; who never married the man-or men-we are told she truly loved; whose second husband, literally starving for her love, carried on a public relationship with a man; who traveled incessantly during her later life to ward off fears of stagnancy; who was too ashamed to reveal, even to her closest friends, the true gravity of her final illness. If Ms. Seebohm were honest with her readers, she might have called this book With Regrets . But that probably doesn't sell very many Vanity Fair excerpts.