You could probably count on one hand the number of registered voters in the room on this rainy morning. After all, the voting age in Massachusetts is 18, a milestone that's still in the future for most of the 190 students who attend the Stoneleigh Burnham School, an exclusive girls' boarding school in Greenfield.

But Carla Howell, the Libertarian Party's candidate for the US Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy, works the room as though it held the key to the election, mixing observations about how she got involved in politics with her decidedly provocative views on the issues.

On health care: "What the government is doing is breaking your legs, then handing you a crutch and saying, `See, we saved you.' "

On pot, cocaine, and other illegal drugs: "Repeal the war on drugs, which is causing horrific destruction in our country."

On guns: "A person who has the audacity to rape a woman, to murder another human being, or to molest a child is not going to care about gun-control laws."

Howell's positions may be decidedly non-mainstream. But in a year in which the Republican Party has found itself unable to put up a serious candidate to challenge Kennedy, her campaign is the only game in town.

The Republican candidate, Jack Robinson, was repudiated by Governor Paul Cellucci and the rest of the GOP establishment after they learned he'd been accused of misbehavior ranging from plagiarism to sticking an unwanted tongue in an ex-girlfriend's mouth. Robinson limps along: according to his most recent filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), he's raised about $146,000 -- most of it from his own bank account -- and spent all but $7000.

By contrast, Howell reports having raised about $605,000 -- more than Republican Joe Malone put up against Kennedy in 1988 -- from some 4700 donors. (Granted, that's no match for Kennedy's war chest of $4.2 million in cash.) She's buying radio time to promote her "Small Government Is Beautiful" theme. She has well-known backers, such as Citizens for Limited Taxation executive director Barbara Anderson (who spoke at a major Howell rally in Burlington this past Tuesday), civil-liberties lawyer (and Phoenix contributor) Harvey Silverglate, and EMC Corporation founder Richard Egan. And she is the titular head of what is, under state law, a major party, by virtue of having won 5.3 percent of the vote in her 1998 campaign for state auditor, nearly double the three percent needed.

All of which presents the media -- not to mention Howell herself -- with a dilemma. On the one hand, Howell is a smart, articulate candidate with serious ideas, money, and a small -- but real -- base of support. On the other hand, she has no realistic chance of winning. By conventional standards, if there's no race, there's no news. And yet if the media choose to ignore Howell, then they are not only giving Kennedy a free ride; they are also passing up an opportunity to educate the public about libertarianism, a political philosophy with proven, if limited, appeal.

Which raises a couple of questions: what are elections for? And what should be the media's role in them? If you listen to, say, Boston University chancellor John Silber, who wrote an op-ed piece in the Globe recently, arguing that Kennedy has earned the right to run unopposed (see "This Just In," News and Features, September 22), then democracy is little more than a constitutionally mandated inconvenience. But if you listen to WBZ Radio (AM 1030) talk-show host David Brudnoy, a Libertarian and a Howell supporter, elections -- and political coverage -- should be about ideas, and not just about who has a realistic chance of winning. "The media owe her a kind of serious treatment, because she's the only one who has a shot at bringing new people in," Brudnoy says.

Howell would appear to fail the first of Patterson's tests, but to pass the second. And if a candidate's views are "highly significant," as Patterson puts it, what business do the media have giving them less than a full airing merely because the person who holds them probably won't win? To be sure, the case shouldn't be overstated. Every news organization in Massachusetts could cover Howell daily between now and the time the polls close, and she probably would still fall well short of victory. And electability has to count for something in determining how much coverage a candidate deserves. Still, the Howell campaign makes for an interesting case study of how time-tested journalistic judgments can marginalize a candidate who may well deserve better.

To date, the media have neither ignored Howell completely nor given her anywhere near the sort of heavy coverage afforded Mitt Romney, a Republican businessman who in 1994 actually led Kennedy in the polls for a while before fading badly at the end.

So far, the story with the highest visibility was published on the front page of the Boston Sunday Globe on October 1: a 1200-plus-word profile of Howell by Brian MacQuarrie that treated her as a substantive if unlikely candidate. Globe political columnist Brian Mooney has also called for Kennedy to debate both Howell and Robinson. (At press time, the Kennedy campaign had still not publicly committed to debating anyone.) The Boston Herald's Karen Crummy (on September 17) and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette's Elaine Thompson (on October 4) have published shorter, inside-the-paper profiles as well.

But let's face it. Unless Kennedy agrees to a series of debates, or unless the newspapers and local television stations start giving the Senate race saturation coverage, the first exposure most people will have to Howell will take place when they walk into the voting booth on November 7 and see her name on the ballot. And the truth is that the media are no more likely to grant Howell her fondest desire than Kennedy is.

"She's a credible candidate, and she's got things to say," says WCVB-TV (Channel 5) political reporter Janet Wu. "But it's kind of hard to argue for too many stories on the US Senate race when there are lots of other stories that need to be covered." Andy Hiller, political editor for WHDH-TV (Channel 7), says, "I suppose my bottom line is that Carla Howell deserves at least as much coverage as Jack E. Robinson, or maybe more. Jack E. Robinson is interesting in an unusual-specimen kind of way. But Carla Howell is interesting to people who are turned off by politics." Even so, Hiller concedes, that still won't add up to more than a small handful of stories.

That sentiment -- that Howell deserves to be taken seriously, but not covered extensively -- is echoed again and again by media decision-makers. The Globe's political editor, Carolyn Ryan, calls Howell an "intriguing candidate," yet adds: "Are we going to put a reporter on Carla Howell exclusively from here to the election? No." Joe Sciacca, Ryan's counterpart at the Herald, says Howell "has demonstrated some viability," but concedes that the Senate campaign will not be covered extensively "if it's not perceived to be a race to begin with." Jon Keller, political reporter for WLVI-TV (Channel 56), finds Howell more credible than Robinson, but adds, "It doesn't merit day-to-day coverage because it's not a real race." Fred Thys, who covers politics for WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), admits that viability is a huge factor in determining how to cover the race. "That's not the way we're supposed to do it, but that's the reality of it," he says.

In fact, it is Kennedy, not the media, who holds Howell's future in his hands. Without televised debates, Howell can't move up enough in the polls to get the media's attention. Emily Rooney, host of Greater Boston on WGBH-TV (Channels 2 and 44), notes that Jesse Ventura was barely a factor in the 1998 Minnesota governor's race until he was included in the debates. "It's really Ted Kennedy's call," Rooney says.

Howell understands this. In an interview over coffee in the Stoneleigh Burnham cafeteria, the candidate insists that if she could debate Kennedy, say, three times, she might actually be able to win. But she's not about to hold the media blameless. "What the media owes its readers is to cover the candidates, cover the issues," she says, charging that the press has "trivialized" the Senate race by focusing on Robinson's foibles rather than the issues. "They should be covering this intensely, because there's a lot of time to make up for."

She compares her situation to that of the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate, Harry Browne, who's getting less media attention than Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan, even though some polls show Browne with more support than Buchanan. The reason, she argues -- not without merit -- is that the media understand only "left versus right" (Gore and Bush) or "far-left versus far-right" (Nader and Buchanan). The Libertarians, by contrast, espouse views that cut across traditional left-right lines, embracing such causes as gay marriage, drug legalization, a smaller military, dramatically lower taxes (including an end to the income tax), a 90 percent cut in the size of the federal government, and the abolition of gun control. Rather than being ideologically inconsistent, Howell says, these views are actually a model of consistency, since they all point toward less government.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, the author of What Are Journalists For? (Yale, 1999), says the media engage in a form of "propaganda" when they take the position that "only what is realistically likely to happen is important." In Rosen's view, "a serious candidate would be someone with serious ideas that ought to be considered, regardless of whether they are a serious threat to win."

Of course, the media aren't going to ignore Carla Howell. But neither are they going to give her the kind of heavy coverage that might actually make her a contender. That's not to say they've made an indefensible call; indeed, it would be odd to see this played as if it were Kennedy versus Romney in '94, or Kerry versus Weld in '96.