A Glorious Mess

We have a Republican front-runner who is weak in the states the Republicans need to carry in the general election. We have a Democratic insurgent who wins states no Democrat can hope to carry in November. We have a Republican leader who is strong in states that have been resiliently Democratic for a generation. We have a Democratic establishment figure who has struggled with capturing the minority votes that have been the bedrock of the Democratic base for half a century.

We have a mess. We have signs of the emergence of an entirely new kind of American politics. We have the most important election since 1980. We have the most fascinating election since 1960.

We also have a Roosevelt figure, the second member of a titanic American political family, with the potential of rewiring American politics; a Kennedy figure, an eloquent, intoxicating symbol of a new generation; and a Reagan figure, a Republican who is making party stalwarts fear he is taking them on a dangerous new course.

We have Democrats who are raising hopes that they may be able to cut into Republican voting blocs. We have Republicans who are flirting with voting for a breakthrough black or female Democratic candidate.

We have a Democratic contender who is widely regarded as a liberal feminist and a Democratic candidate who is widely regarded as a soothing moderate, and yet the moderate has been voting more reliably liberal in the Senate than has the liberal. We have a Republican challenger who represents the modern Republican base of religious conservatives and Southern whites, but who still seems peripheral in his own party.

We have a Democratic Party that seems hopelessly divided on whom to nominate but resolutely united on the issues. We have a Republican Party that has nearly settled on its nominee but is deeply unsettled internally.

We have two candidates with ties to Arkansas, two with ties to Illinois — and the first occasion ever for Hawaii to regard itself plausibly as the potential mother of a president. We have two Democrats from the far extremes of the baby boom with vastly different approaches to the political arts.

It doesn't get more confusing than this. It doesn't get more illogical than this. It doesn't get better than this.

Start with the Republican contest, where Senator McCain of Arizona has moved into a strong lead but still has miles to go before he can sleep as the Republican nominee.

He has more of the profile of the leader of the Party of Lincoln than of the Party of Reagan — even though Mr. McCain had strong emotional ties with Reagan and, as a recently released Vietnam POW, was one of the guests of honor at the 1974 city-upon-a-hill speech that some conservatives regard as one of the most sacred texts of Reaganism.

But the emergence of Mr. McCain is causing amazing agony in the Republican Party, where he is regarded as too cozy with the reformers, too contemptuous of the Republican base, and too hot-headed in his own Senate caucus.

It has not gone unnoticed in Republican circles that many Democrats, including the last nominee, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, thought that the Arizona Republican would have made a splendid Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004. Ask a Boston Red Sox fan how he felt when he first thought of Roger Clemens in a Yankee uniform.

Now — with Mitt Romnney suspending his campaign — Republicans on all sides of the Party's wondrous schisms are calling on Mr. McCain to start the healing process. He is being urged to call the talk-radio hosts, to reach out to religious conservatives, to keep his focus on the 1776 Declaration of Independence instead of drafting personal declarations of independence on issues from the environment to campaign finance to immigration. He may be constitutionally unable to do so.

The Democratic side of this story is a different tale entirely. Samuel Johnson, the best political journalist ever to write in English, once described a second marriage as the triumph of hope over experience — precisely the formulation Senator Obama is trying to work in the primaries and caucuses this winter.

Both he and Senator Clinton have framed their nomination struggle as a battle of hope, the Obama calling card, against experience, the Clinton calling card. Tuesday's primary in Georgia, which Mr. Obama won decisively, underlined the division on the hope/experience front. In exit interviews, these voters, by a margin of nearly 6-to-1, identified Mr. Obama as the candidate who could bring about change. But the same voters identified Mrs. Clinton by nearly 9-to-1 as the candidate who had the right experience to be president. What the Republicans seem to want is a candidate with the personal heroism of Mr. McCain, the business acumen of Governor Romney, and the spirituality and folksiness of Governor Huckabee — though there is virtually no overlap in the three men's demographic appeal.

The Democrats want someone who offers the hope of Mr. Obama and the experience of Mrs. Clinton — though Mr. Obama's brand of hope still seems symbolic and Mrs. Clinton's record of experience still seems thin.

We don't know what happens next, but we know what each leading contender must do next. Mr. McCain must win some stalwart Republican places; one in the South would do nicely. Mr. Obama, accomplished in winning places such as North Dakota, Idaho, Delaware, Alaska, and Utah, must win an important Democratic state outside his home of Illinois; Ohio seems like a good place to start. Mrs. Clinton must stanch the flow of interest and momentum to Mr. Obama; only by doing so can she continue her argument, the foundation of her campaign strategy, that the momentum is going her way, still.

It's a mess. It's confusing. It's fabulous. For years editors held imaginary (and, sometimes, real) debates with readers, telling them that things that were dull were really things that were important. This is important, and there's nothing dull about it.