No one can deny that it’s much easier to watch “My Three Sons” on retro-cable than to figure out what to do a week from now. In two major jurisdictions, we’re looking not to the 21st century, MTV-VH1 generation, but are throwing the ball to the old guys namely, Frank Lautenberg in New Jersey and Walter Mondale in Minnesota.

Lautenberg was recruited when disgraced Sen. Robert Torricelli was forced to step aside. Mondale is the consensus replacement candidate for Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash last Friday. But Mondale is not Wellstone, nor does he represent what Wellstone did. For the Democrats, he, like Lautenberg, is a known name and maybe, just maybe, even electable with just days to campaign.

But face the facts: Both guys are septuagenarians. Where’s the present, let alone the future?

In New York, we are so pathetic that Rush Limbaugh has to stoke Carl McCall’s gubernatorial campaign. Limbaugh has a point when he says the Democratic National Committee is “not standing behind” McCall and that New York is on the verge of “a slipshod victory” for Gov. George Pataki. Limbaugh, who no doubt wants Pataki to win, is doing what the national Democratic Party isn’t: cajoling regular folks to send a dollar or two to McCall’s campaign so there will be “a genuine competition here.”

HELLO! Why does it take a Limbaugh to lead this crusade?

Who wants to get into this fray?

When I was oh so much younger, I thought of going this route. On the don’t-do-it side: In first grade I forced a new kid, who turned out to be a cousin, to eat a roach. I could just see some journalists digging that up. On the do-it side: I am from Deep South poverty, and I did pick one piece of cotton outside Plains, Ga., so I can honestly say, “I PICKED COTTON!”

OK, I jest. But people like me with a brain and a heart have been discouraged from going for the political gold. Now we’re pretty much stuck with the oldsters or the scions of those who’ve done it before sons of Mario Cuomo, Hubert Humphrey and Mondale, daughter of Robert Kennedy and, on a New York level, the begots of such as Basil Paterson (state Sen. David) and Harlem’s blemished icon, the Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (Assemblyman Adam).

But where are the rest of us? Where, truly, is the new generation of political thinkers, of policy-

makers?

Wellstone, God bless him, said in an article in The Nation years ago: “We do not lack ideas. We do not lack knowledge. We do not lack committed people. But we lack a national commitment.”

Too many of us are wiling away our time because we presume we have no power of the political kind. But as Bill Cosby admonished a full house at my church a few Sundays ago, “Do something.”

Wellstone did. Mondale did. And now Lautenberg and Mondale are being asked to do it again.

Where are the rest of us?