Earlier than ever?

Media buzz has it that the 2008 presidential campaign season is starting earlier than ever before.  John M. Broder and Patrick Healy said so last week in the New York Times:

Two years before the next president is inaugurated and a full year before the first vote is cast, the contest for the White House is off to a breathtakingly fast start, exposing an ever-growing field of candidates to longer, more intensive scrutiny and increasing the amount of money they need to remain viable.

and:

"It makes it nearly impossible for a dark horse candidate to break out of the pack and challenge the front-runner(s) and thus isn’t healthy for the process,” Mr. Weaver wrote in an e-mail message on Sunday. “All of these states, who are moving up early, want to play and have an impact. But oddly enough, it ultimately will limit the legitimate candidate choices for the nation at large in the primary process."

The candidates could be forced to move more quickly to take positions on big issues, stripping them of the chance to run on more gauzy platforms in the early stages and therefore exposing them to more direct criticism from rivals, interest groups and the news media. They will face earlier encounters with one another — New Hampshire and South Carolina are planning full-scale debates this spring — that will require them to display both policy expertise and a comfort level in front of the cameras.

So too did the US Department of State (why in the world is a flack working in Foggy Bottom writing about this?):

The 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign season is off to an extraordinarily early start, according to the head of a leading public opinion polling organization.

Although the election is not until November 4, 2008, many of the expected contenders already have announced their interest in running for the highest office in the United States, said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. Those who have not publicly discussed their intentions likely will have to do so soon to be competitive, he said during a digital video press conference hosted by the State Department Foreign Press Center in New York January 18.

I completely disagree.

Four years ago to the day, I made an online contribution of $50 to DeanForAmerica (which now redirects to the Democratic National Committee homepage).  Which means that I had already studied the 2004 candidate pool, examined what Gephardt, Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, Kucinich et al. were saying and how they were saying it, listened to their speeches, perhaps even attended some of their meetups or rallies.  I had already come to understand intensely and deeply that Howard Dean’s message and his attitude spoke to my concerns and ideas.  I was already strongly behind the governor’s campaign, strongly committed to working to get him nominated and elected.  It didn’t happen, of course, but that’s not my point.

On January 28, 2007—in sharp contrast to January 28, 2003—I am nowhere close to sending money to a presidential candidate.  None of them stir me.  None of them speak to my soul. 

Although I’m far more deeply enmeshed in the political process than I was in January 2003, I find that the 2008 candidates have been much less adept at defining and revealing themselves than had the 2004 candidates at that time.  Or, perhaps, it’s that the Dean campaign was so utterly different from all other 2004 campaigns that that alone drew my attention to him. 

One of the primary attributes of Howard Dean, at least at the beginning, was that he was speaking to those outside the Beltway, outside of the usual political class.  It was plain talk rather than nuance or triangulation, an in-your-face attitude toward Bush and his cronies.  This was during the buildup to Dubya’s Iraq debacle, when the conventional wisdom had it that he was unbeatable, that anything less than adulatory cheerleading for the malAdministration was tantamount to treason ... so a presidential candidate with Dean’s pugnacity was a different kind of animal.

One other, small, point about the upcoming presidential election season.  Another paragraph in the above-referenced State Department article merits some comment:

Newport cited several reasons for the early start. One is that it is the first presidential election since 1952 in which no incumbent president or vice president will be a party’s nominee for president. This provides a large opportunity for candidates of both parties, as it is “truly open on both sides of the spectrum,” he said.

Fifty-six years since that election, but even that isn’t really a full analogue of 2008.  In 1952, the sitting president hadn’t been elected (well, in Bush’s case, “elected") twice; Truman, of course, had become Chief Executive on the death of Franklin Roosevelt.  We have to go quite a bit farther back to find a presidential election in which the two-term president’s VP didn’t run to replace him.  All the way, as a matter of fact, to 1920.  In that year, after eight years of Woodrow Wilson, vice president Thomas Marshall was never part of the presidential candidate picture.

Comments

Thanks for pointing out this post at my Kos diary, N.

Dean was soooo different from everything we’d seen before (and everyone we’ve seen since). An accomplished governor, a truth-teller, a lone voice (in early 2003, anyway) calling the political establishment on its crapola.

At least we managed to make him DNC chair, which was a mighty achievement, indeed, and one that’s paying dividendds with the 50-state strategy.

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