Only 648 Days Until the Election!

By KAREN TUMULTY

The last time a little-known Arkansas governor ran for President, he waited until four months before the Iowa caucuses to make his announcement. That worked out pretty well for Bill Clinton, so it's understandable that until a few weeks ago, Mike Huckabee thought he had plenty of time. Buoyed by early encouragement from some Republican activists and savoring his last days in the Governor's mansion in Little Rock, Huckabee assumed that he would wait until at least the spring before announcing whether he would run in 2008. Better to move slowly and develop a sure message, he figured, than to rush in before he was ready. But this election is different. Huckabee is realizing that time is a luxury he doesn't have. Top political talent is being snapped up. Antsy potential supporters are starting to look elsewhere and are asking what's taking so long to start his campaign. Then there's money. Even if he starts today, Huckabee will have to raise about $2 million a week to get to the $100 million or so that it will take for him to be considered a serious contender. "It seems awfully early to me," he says, "but my decision is something that has to be announced soon."

There's nearly a year to go before the Iowa caucuses, but it sure feels like the 2008 presidential-election season has reached full swing. There are at least 20 actual or assumed or wished-for candidates--nine Democrats and 11 Republicans--a field that narrowed by one when John Kerry dropped out on Wednesday. Most of them have begun raising money, hiring staff and lining up endorsements. The past couple of weeks alone have brought announcements by three Senators--Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democratic side, Sam Brownback on the Republican--and one Governor, Democrat Bill Richardson of New Mexico. In the crowd there are, for the first time, credible contenders who give voters a chance to make history on a host of fronts--by electing the first woman President or the first African American or the first Latino or the first Mormon.

To track voter sentiment--and candidates' odds of winning--TIME is launching the Election Index, a regular feature that will pinpoint the intersection of how much Americans know about each candidate and how much they like what they see. The surprising news is that this week's Election Index puts former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani ahead of Arizona Senator John McCain, despite the latter's formidable organization and resources, for the top spot in the G.O.P. Hillary Clinton leads the Democrats, but the Election Index (see page 34) shows she has slightly less potential general-election support than Giuliani.

The eagerness of candidates to make themselves known and liked as quickly as possible is understandable, as this will be the most wide-open presidential race in generations and the first since 1928 in which no incumbent President or Vice President appears on a primary ballot anywhere. The states are as anxious as the candidates to get things going, and more and more of them are deciding they don't want to be left out of the make-or-break early balloting. The calendar is still in flux, but as things look now, 20 or more states will have their primaries or caucuses before mid-February 2008. Practically speaking, that means candidates will need full-fledged national operations by this fall, and there will be little opportunity for the late-starting insurgent. It suggests that both parties will have settled on their nominees fully eight months before Election Day, giving a depressingly early launch to what promises to be a brutal general-election campaign. At the same time, however, it could be harder for a front runner in either primary to deliver an early knockout punch to the rest of the field. "The odd effect could be to elongate the process, not shorten it," says former Republican chairman Ken Mehlman, who was George Bush's 2004 campaign manager. "On each side, there will be two or three candidates who will have the resources to survive a key loss early on."

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."