So argues Michael Barone; and since there’s no keener or more insightful observer of American politics, if this is what he sees, we’d best take a long, hard look. It’s his explanation of what is otherwise a surprising and somewhat confusing fact: “every [presidential] candidate’s strategy has failed.” That’s not something one would expect, given all the seasoned candidates and operatives out there, but it’s the truth; Barone argues that the reason for it is that the ground has shifted out from under their feet.
For a decade from 1995 to 2005, we operated in a period of trench-warfare politics, with two approximately equal-sized armies waging a culture war in which very small amounts of ground made the difference between victory and defeat. It was pretty clear what the major issues were, what strategies were necessary to win a party’s nomination, how to maximize your side’s turnout on election day (and, increasingly, in early voting).
As more than a few people have noted, it was Karl Rove’s mastery of this situation (which he intentionally exacerbated as a political strategy) which produced victories for Bush in 2000 and 2004.
But times change. Somewhere between Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006, I believe we entered a period of open-field politics, in which voters and candidates are moving around—a field in which there are no familiar landmarks or new signposts. . . . The fact that every campaign’s experts came up with losing strategies suggests that, in this year’s open-field politics, all the old rules may be broken. It’s been a wild ride in the 35 days since the Iowa caucuses, and it may be even wilder in the 271 days until the polls open in November.
It’s an intriguing thesis, and a compelling one—especially coming from someone with Barone’s track record for being right. It suggests that, far from the foregone Democratic coronation many have expected, that the ’08 presidential election may belong to whoever figures the new rules out first.