CONTRARY TO WHAT many along the American political spectrum have argued, voters do face a distinct choice on Election Day 1976. Across virtually the full range of issues--the economy, foreign policy, civil rights, tax reform and the environment, to name a few--Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford offer contrasting visions of America.

One of these is familiar to us today; we have lived in it since August 1974 and, in many ways, since Lyndon B. Johnson left office in January 1969. It is, for those who seek the comforts of constancy, a predictable world with the hallmarks of a Republican administration: an economic policy featuring massive unemployment and now even a threatened return to full-employment inflation; an undemocratic foreign policy that has helped bless the world with an intolerably repressive regime in Chile, prolonged killing in Vietnam, and belated, expedient moves against the white minority government in Rhodesia apparently only to save that of South Africa; an approach to civil rights highlighted by the administration's recent blocking of public school surveys vital to enforcement of civil rights legislation and Ford's inflammatory flirtation with Boston's busing opponents; a tax policy that effectively increases social stratification instead of countering the regressive impact of sales and property taxes; and finally, an environmental policy that brought a veto of the watered down stripmining bill and opposition to pollution standards that could restore tolerable air quality to American cities and cut medical bills by millions of dollars.

As a challenger--and as a new face in national politics--ex-Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter offers a less divinable world over the next four, and possibly eight, years. Like all but the most admirable and least ambitious politicians, Carter has been guilty of occasional hyperbole and dissembling, much as his opponent has doled out his share of misrepresentation and, in the case of aspects of his role in stopping the initial congressional study of Watergate, silence. Carter's elusiveness is indeed unsettling, as are his conservative stands on several domestic and foreign policy questions such as balanced budgets, gun control, the Panama Canal and detente.

Yet Carter's program for the United States remains, fundamentally, a plan devised in the tradition of the Democratic party: it offers a compassionate, risk-taking federal government that recognizes what joblessness means to a human being. It offers a government that could transcend the cozy goal of preserving international "stability"--which often means active support of military or oligarchic regimes in struggling nations--and insist on integrating human rights considerations into foreign policy. And it offers a sensitivity to the rights of minorities, to the consequences of an unfair--or, as Carter says, "disgraceful"--tax structure, and to the suicidal indulgence of current U.S. environmental policy.

Carter's campaign has also featured an extraordinary focus on the need for providing the country with firm, ethical leadership. This deemphasis of the prime substantive issues is disturbing both in this campaign and in American politics generally. Yet it remains accurate--as polls of the electorate show--that our present national malaise can be traced in part back to our leaders. Richard M. Nixon showed Americans that it is possible to sling enough mud, in public and in private, to rise from the gutter into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And the now-pardoned president also consistently set a model of self-interest that encouraged young Americans not to sacrifice their early adulthood to social causes like the Peace Corps but rather to the womb-like safety and promised material rewards of professional school. Gerald Ford has only nudged our national self-image up a small notch from the Nixonesque nadir; today we are encouraged to be the kind of team player for mediocrity that offers a warm tribute to Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz after his unconscionable remarks about blacks.

What Jimmy Carter will supply as an alternative, he says, is to help the United States to "be great again." The words are scary; they smack of the manifest destiny arrogance that led this country into the Philippines and, half a century later, into Vietnam. But Carter's call appears actually to be for a country that is great because is feeds and educates its poor, because its people are not divided into white and black, and because its power is used for selfless purposes abroad.

The differences between Carter and Ford, while striking, bear only moderate resemblance to the chasm between the vice-presidential nominees, Sen. Robert J. Dole (R.-Kans.) and Sen. Walter F. Mondale (D.-Minn.). As his performance in the televised mid-October debate indicates, Dole offers the American people a return to the black days of Nixon and Agnew, to an era of acerbic, divisive diatribes that alienate the young and disadvantaged. Mondale promises instead to be a powerful champion of social justice. The vice-presidential choice is itself vital enough to determine the choice between the Democratic and Republican tickets.

Jimmy Carter is not, as he admits, perfect. He can be a cold, inscrutable person. Superficially this seems a marked contrast to "nice guy" Jerry Ford. But the president's supposed personal decency like Carter's personal reserve, does not intrude on his political decisions. For evidence one need only turnt to the callous bombing of mainland Cambodia after the belligerent Mayaguez rescue operation; to Ford's effort to impeach ex-Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas for writing an article in a pornographic magazine; and to his Whip Inflation Now program, which helped plunge the country into a severe recession and expanded mass unemployment.

The American voters' choice on November 2 is not limited to Ford and Carter. Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D.-Minn.) is seeking support for a third party candidacy that could weaken the Democrat's showing enough to throw the election to Ford. It is a challenge to sanction this indulgent candidacy in an elction in which the American people face clear alternatives. While well-heeled liberals may be able to afford the cost of purist voting, they should consider the consequences of their action for the men and women who have spent the last eight years battling to protect their meager standard of living and oft-assaulted self-respect.