Only 648 Days Until the Election!

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Is all this a good thing for democracy? More than a few political hands are worried that the accelerated schedule is putting high-priced consultants and moneymen in the driver's seat, preventing candidates from figuring out their own answers to the question that famously stumped Teddy Kennedy in 1979: Why do you want to be President? The result could be a campaign that offers voters plenty of carefully managed themes but little in the way of policy solutions. "If what you're going to do all day every day is exhaust yourself running around, meeting with precinct leaders, raising money, there's an exhaustion, a banality and a narrowness of focus, all of which are bad for the American system," says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is considering a bid for the G.O.P. nomination. "This may be where it ends up. It doesn't mean it's reasonable, rational or good for the country."

There is value in listening to what voters have to say outside the scripted settings of a big campaign. Vermont's then Governor Howard Dean, a physician, intended to center his 2004 campaign on health-care issues, but the more he talked to Democratic voters in Iowa, the more he realized that their passions were being stirred by the Iraq war. Hammering home his opposition to the war turned Dean--briefly--into the front runner, bringing in a flood of contributions over the Internet.

This time the Internet will be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it gives all the candidates a chance to get their message out without spending big money on television advertising. Both Obama and Clinton made their announcements on the Internet. "You don't have to go from city to city to city to do events," says former Senator Bob Kerrey, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1992. "You don't have to be there for people to feel that you are." But there will also be the caution of knowing that every stray utterance could end up on YouTube. "The margin for rhetorical errors is quite small today. Any slight misstep can be distributed in all 50 states simultaneously," Kerrey adds. "There will be less creativity in talking--and in thinking."

Campaign veterans caution against taking this early frenzy of election action too seriously, noting that actual voters aren't likely to start paying much attention until after Labor Day. But the mania has a way of feeding on itself, as every campaign seeks to impress the media, the donors and one another with its poll numbers, endorsements, financial strength and organization on the ground.

And there's more than a bit of shadowboxing going on. Republican consultant Mike Murphy, who has worked for G.O.P. contenders John McCain and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, says he always hangs a map behind his desk--and has a campaign intern pepper it randomly with colored stickpins--so that visitors will be impressed with his campaign's "field operation." The real measure of a campaign in the early stages, he says, is often what it isn't doing. "If you hear one campaign is talking to Mayor Bag O'Doughnuts, you feel you've got to run and get a meeting with the mayor," Murphy says. "The campaigns that use the preseason well are the campaigns that are secure and ringwise enough to say no a lot."

Don't count on it. If anything will bring these campaigns back to reality, it could be the electorate."The saving grace is the voters, who at the end of the day insist on real substance," says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, who was Bill Clinton's chief domestic policy adviser. But then again, he adds, "they don't always get what they want."