The Art of the Campaign

Historians point to other examples where both candidates were on the same page. In 1932, the election was about the Depression (both Herbert Hoover, the Republican president, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his Democratic challenger, vowed to improve the economy). In 1984, it was about the Cold War and the size of the federal government (Ronald Reagan promised to keep the government small, while Walter Mondale said he would raise taxes to cope with the deficit, but they were both essentially talking about the same subjects).

So sometimes the campaigns revolve around the obvious. "Some elections are battles for what is the major issue facing the country," noted Michael Barone, the author of "The Almanac of American Politics."

"Usually the more pain we're in, the more things are going in a bad direction, the more elections seem pretty simple -- which is a call for some sort of change," said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who worked on McCain's 2000 presidential bid. "When public opinion is a little less focused, the election is about smaller things, and it's harder to paint it in broad strokes."

Sometimes, Barone said, voters see around the corner before politicians do. "In 1972, the Democrats thought it was about ending the war [in Vietnam], but Nixon had already basically ended the U.S. involvement by the time the election came along," said Barone, who counts himself among the then-Democrats who thought that Vietnam would define that race, only to see the antiwar candidate, George McGovern, lose.

War is a major undercurrent again in 2008. But will Iraq be what the campaign is ultimately about?

Obama, who was against the Iraq invasion from the get-go, is counting on it, especially since the front-running Clinton voted to authorize the 2003 invasion.

But it remains to be seen how national security -- still a major factor in the national psyche just seven years after al-Qaeda's September 2001 terrorist attacks -- will fit into the equation. And will the "war on terror" (a term already rejected by former senator John Edwards of North Carolina as a simplistic bumper sticker posing as a foreign policy) continue to drive voters? Or has the electorate evolved into a post-post-9/11 mindset?

That's certainly what Edwards is counting on. He has become perhaps the biggest gambler in the top tier of Democrats, deciding to stake his candidacy not only on the Iraq war (which he voted for but now vehemently opposes) but also on domestic issues, particularly poverty. Though there has been little to suggest that the general election will be about the poor, Edwards has calculated that paying attention to domestic concerns will entrance the Democratic Party base enough to win him the nomination -- and that he can figure out the rest from there.

Douglas Brinkley, a Tulane historian, said that a campaign that's about Iraq plus national security would tend to favor the more seasoned Clinton, or perhaps another candidate who is advocating a careful, responsible withdrawal rather than an immediate departure. "It's like what Nixon faced in 1968: peace with honor," Brinkley said. "I don't think the country's mood is as antiwar as you think. It's more, 'We've done what we were supposed to do; it's time to come home.' "

Meanwhile, the Republicans are banking on the election's being about national security (traditionally one of the party's electoral strengths), firmly intertwined with the war in Iraq. That's a formula that worked for Bush in 2004 but failed his party miserably in the 2006 midterm elections, in which the Republicans lost control of both the House and the Senate to a Democratic Party galvanized by the war.

For all the public's misgivings about Bush's handling of Iraq, the GOP candidates hope that the electorate will still be reluctant to hand the mess over to the Democrats. In particular, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front-runner, is betting that national security will trump all else -- and praying that the images of his dash to the scene of the 9/11 attacks will outweigh his pro-choice stands during the primaries.

For his part, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who is credited with cleaning up the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, is hoping that the election will hinge at least in part on a desire for a more competent executive. But even he -- a Republican who more or less agrees with Bush on the issues -- is running on change, using his experience outside the Beltway as his chief asset. Last Wednesday, he began airing a new ad in Iowa titled, "Change Begins." "Washington politicians in both parties have proven they can't control spending and they won't control our borders," Romney says in the ad.