My guess is the plot would be about the same, but the music would be a lot better.

The plots of most operas are pretty mundane: boy meets girl, the two fall in love, one or both of them die but not before someone sings a high C.

The plots of presidential campaigns are equally mundane. Candidates promise to solve health care, cut taxes and balance the budget but no one sings a high C.

What the two have in common are story lines that will never actually happen in real life. Where the two differ is in the high C.

What 's a high C? Essentially, it is the defining note of opera sopranos and tenors (who tend to be the stars). When the singer hits and holds the high C, the audience generally starts to applaud.

The tension of opera is the tension between the libretto, an Italian term for the words, and the music. The story stays close to Earth but the music soars to the heavens.

I think we can make a good case for the idea that politics would be a lot more ennobling if our candidates spent more time reaching for the equivalent of the high C. That would mean spelling out a real vision for America, a vision that goes beyond announcing "our best days are still ahead " and offers a serious consideration of how the country might resolve its ongoing problems in procuring energy supplies, in caring for its growing elderly population, for integrating immigrants into the mainstream of society.

Of course, we also want to think our president cares about what happens to us today. We want our next president to care about lost jobs and to worry about Social Security. To lift a phrase from the 1990s, we want a president who feels our pain.

But, if governing is the art of the libretto, politics must also be the art of the high C. The world 's great politicians helped us see ourselves in a future far more grand and far more promising than we had previously imagined. Franklin Delano Roosevelt convinced us to find hope in the middle of a great economic depression. John Fitzgerald Kennedy convinced us we could fly to the moon. Ronald Reagan convinced us it was morning in America. They could hit the high C.

I confess what got me thinking about all this is the Madison Opera production of Lucia di Lammemoor, which will be staged Friday night and Sunday afternoon at the Overture Center. The opera is best known for its "mad " scene, in which Lucia, having murdered her husband, goes crazy. But she does so singing some of the most lyrical music ever performed.

It 's the paradox between beautiful song and insane behavior that makes the opera work. It 's the paradox between governing in libretto and campaigning in music that makes a political system work best. We need both, but we 're lacking the high C.

Contact Wineke at bwineke@madison.com or at 252-6146. Read Wineke 's blog at www.madison.com/wsj/blogs.