Election time ought to be more than a time to assess candidates for public office. It ought to be a time to assess the condition and the future of the city, state or nation.

Doing that matters as much as who is going to be elected mayor of New York City next week or whether the media handicapping the horse race are going to be proven right or wrong about a Giuliani landslide.

In most parts of this city, New Yorkers feel safer on the streets and subways and in their homes. If Rudolph Giuliani gains another four years in City hall, the drop in crime will be why. And no matter how you analyze the decline -- which has occurred nationwide and inmost of the country's big cities -- it is surely cause for rejoicing.

In this election year, the city's perennial economic woes were suddenly forgotten, as a politically driven agenda used a Wall Street windfall to fund a variety of popular initiatives. Despite the stock market boom, however, New York's economy is in deep trouble. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen; while the market for Upper East Side co-ops sizzles, so does the market for cardboard boxes where the homeless can spend the night.

The city's unemployment rate is 9.5 percent, nearly twice the national average, and worse that Detroit, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Washington, or Los Angeles. In the Bronx, unemployment stands at 12.6 percent. Welfare reform has resulted in cleaner parks, but not in jobs that provide dignity and a living wage.

The city's strategy for nurturing the private economy continues to be tilted heavily towards large companies, especially in the finance industry. Its main tactic continues to be tax breaks for big businesses.

As state Senator Franz Leichter has shown, nine of the 31 companies that got tax breaks, then laid off workers. The city has struck tax incentive deals even with companies that expressed no interest in leaving the city, and funneled double doses of tax breaks to some of the biggest and most profitable companies. Small companies can't afford the lawyering it takes to participate in the city's incentive programs, yet they create most of the new jobs and help build the diversified economy the city will need and still won't have when the financial markets turn downward.

This is a city that doesn't seem to care for its young. The state of the public schools -- where classes are conducted in the bathrooms and storage closets of buildings that leak, creak, and crumble -- is shocking. Ed Koch was unaware of this as of so many scandals; David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani each conspired to make things worse by deferring maintenance and cutting budgets.

Now schools Chancellor Rudy Crew has begun a campaign against the small alternative schools, like the Bronx New School and Jonas Bronck Academy, that constitute one of the few hopeful initiatives in public education. Schools that offered hope that New York would have the innovative fire to inspire the city's students, and to reclaim the lives of some of those now left to wander lost, are in danger of being supervised, standardized, and marginalized to death.

Mr. Giuliani has also turned his back on after-school programs for the young. Appealed to at a town hall meeting in Riverdale a couple of years back, he asserted that teen centers such as those run by the Riverdale Community Center made little difference in the lives of children and, good as his word, cut the funding for it and other area youth agencies.

Racism compounds each of these problems. It is at the root of the growing tendency of middle class New Yorker whose children don't attend public schools to give up on them, of the police brutality symbolized by but by no means confined to the Louima case, of a mean-spiritedness cloaked as tough-mindedness in public discourse.

If the poor are getting poorer, if even the crumbs of welfare and poverty programs are being denied them, if the hope that their children will live a life better than their parents is dimming, how long can it be before the crime rate becomes a kind of Dow Jones Index of misery and begins to climb?

Or even if the stock market ignores the laws of fiscal gravity, even if communities like Riverdale remain safe and insulated from the buffets of a cruel economy and an indifferent city, will New York again become a city to celebrate?

There was a time when New York was a city with a mission. It was a place that not only welcomed immigrants from all over the world and ambitious young from all over the nation, but offered them the tools to transform themselves into better men and women. That was why New York City nourished a wonderful public library system, great public schools, a municipal radio station unique in the Untied States, and the country's only municipal public colleges.

The moral vision that underlay the creation of such institutions has been absent from the city's political life for decades. Without it, election time becomes just a time to pull a lever, instead of a time to reflect on how we can make our New York a city worth living in, not just a place to earn a living in.