The Fall Replacements

So will we have two presidential campaigns this quadrennium, as some politicians now seem to hope?

The first would have started, oh, several eons ago and will wrap up sometime this summer, when we tire of the first round of leading candidates and send them limping to their locker rooms. Then, as Newt Gingrich and Fred Thompson and who knows how many others imagine it, fresh teams will suit up and run onto the field.

Not likely, of course. But if the scenario is not entirely preposterous, it's not because of any inadequacy in the first squads. The three top challengers in each party have their weaknesses, but they are not the so-called dwarves of past campaigns. All six are formidable politicians and are plausible as Oval Office occupants.

No, the problem is the mismatch between what the Big Six have decided they must do to compete in a front-loaded primary schedule, on the one hand, and the needy impatience, the hunger for titillation of our political culture, on the other.

In the absence, month after month, of real tests -- that is, of votes being cast -- the marathoning candidates turn to other measures of seriousness: the millions they raise, the consultants they hire, the endorsements they rack up. But these all cut against the public's demand for fresh faces with new-generation politics.

We want them, too, to seem to be having fun on the trail. But look what they have to do, day after day, month after month: raise money, deliver a speech, raise more money, deliver the same speech. We want them to be natural and unscripted, but for the most part we ignore what they say when they say what they intend, pouncing only when they slip.

Is it coincidence that the two touted as the front-runners at the start, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, seem to be having the least fun? Maybe it was just an unlucky shot, but a photograph from Selma appeared to capture it in Clinton's case: a band of politicians and civil rights leaders linking arms to replicate the famous march, with Bill Clinton on one side looking over at Barack Obama on the other, each grinning and apparently having the time of his life, and Hillary between them, appearing grimly determined to walk on.

Partly, you have to think, the grimness is a consequence of the constant pressure to calibrate between principle and polls. Clinton had positioned herself as serious and moderate on national security; but squeezed between her pro-war vote in 2002 and antiwar primary voters, she has had to edge relentlessly toward the deadlines for withdrawal from Iraq that she once disdained. McCain's discomfort in the role of establishment figure and Bush defender has been much remarked upon; while he refuses to trim on Iraq, his struggle to get right with primary voters on immigration and other issues is painful to watch.

So will the voters get bored of these two soap operas, and then of Giuliani and Romney and Edwards and Obama, and demand some new productions by fall? The pros say it can't happen: The Feb. 5 "super-primary," when California and so many other states will vote so early, demands that any serious candidate have tens or hundreds of millions banked before Iowa and New Hampshire, because there will be no time after to raise funds for what amounts to an instant national campaign. And that demands the early start.

Gingrich, no slouch on political tactics, begs to differ. He points out that it took not all that much time for Obama to go from mentioned to phenom to leading candidate. In the age of Internet fundraising -- and boosted in the broadcasting world by "my friend Sean" and "my friend Rush" -- Gingrich reasons that he could enter the race in October and have all the resources he needs by January. It may be a stretch to think of Gingrich as a fresh face, but come fall he might seem that way.

And who knows -- maybe even the candidates who essentially allowed themselves to be defeated by the demands of the first cycle of the presidential campaign will return, rested and unbloodied. Remember Mark Warner?

You'd hope for a third way -- one in which candidates don't have to commit two or three years ahead of time but don't get chewed up if they do. That might require a different system of campaign finance; certainly it would take a more rational primary schedule.

Maybe in 2012.

fredhiatt@washpost.com