Word comes from the Federal Election Commission that 2008 most likely will give us the first $1 billion presidential race, which should come as no surprise since just about everything costs more than it did the last time America had a presidential election, in 2004. Political campaigns are subject to inflation just like natural gas.

There will be a lot of spending even before the main event begins in the summer of 2008, after the parties have selected their presidential candidates. For the first time since 1952, the race for the presidency will be wide open. No incumbent from the top ranks of the executive branch will be running. President Bush is ineligible under the two-term limit, and his vice president, Richard Cheney, has professed a lack of interest.

So presidential hopes are springing forth in many a breast, some belonging to people whose names are hardly household words, such as the Democratic governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, and his South Carolina counterpart, Mark Sanford, a Republican. Others are familiar faces, including Senator Biden, the Delaware Democrat who has haunted the Sunday talk shows for years, and the former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, the Georgian who played a big role in winning Republican control of the House in 1994.

Then there are the veteran campaigners. Both Vice President Gore, of global warming fame, and Swift Boat veteran John Kerry are testing the waters. A former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, will try to out-gore Gore with a pitch for “renewable” energy sources, no doubt with ethanol made from South Dakota grain as one of his favorite products.

PoliticalMoneyLine, a Congressional Quarterly Web site, counts 15 Democratic hopefuls and 12 Republican aspirants at this early stage, which is almost two years before the voters will make their decision. But there are a few showing early foot, as they say in horse racing. Handicapping politicians has become like handicapping horses, where the amount bet determines the favorite. With presidential contenders, it’s also the level of betting, by campaign contributors. Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republicans Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain are doing well, with sizable war chests in hand already.

Who makes these bets? The really big money comes from thousands of political action committees operated by advocacy organizations such as MoveOn.com, labor unions, or business corporations with a financial stake in what kinds of laws get manufactured by Congress, federal agencies, or activist judges. That means just about every business of any size. Corporations are not particularly ideological, as evidenced by the corporate PAC contributions already pouring in to the Democrats who will head important committees in the new Congress.

The McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform” law of 2002 was billed as a way of “taking money out of politics.” But, as the FEC prediction of a $1 billion election should make clear, there will hardly be a shortage of money to wage politics over the coming two years. Many would-be advocates will take advantage of Section 527 of the tax code, which allows political activists to set up non-profit action groups, so long as they don’t specifically mention candidates by name.

The FEC this month rapped three groups, MoveOn, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth, for violating this limitation in the 2004 presidential campaign, hitting them with fines totaling more than $600,000. About half of that was levied against the veterans’ group for the attacks on Senator Kerry. But it is not beyond the mind of man to fashion campaigns that make clear which candidate is being supported without ever mentioning his or her name and invoking the displeasure of the FEC. The 527s are like a large truck passing through the maze of campaign finance restrictions.

Those restrictions seem to some of us as a gross violation of the constitutional right to free expression, which if it doesn’t apply to political expression, would seem to be missing one of the primary purposes the drafters of the Constitution had in mind. But perhaps it is part of the genius of the American system that ways are found to circumvent silly laws almost before the ink is dry on them. Such seems to be the case with efforts to “take money out of politics.” So bring on the billion-dollar election, we say. There will be plenty of money available for all the fund-raisers and lawyers, for commercials and ads and direct mail campaigns, and the American voter will be the best informed in the history of democracy.