by Paul West

It’s a cliché, but there’s truth to the line that candidates and campaign strategists often fight the last war—and not always to their benefit.

There are good reasons for this tendency in presidential politics. History never repeats itself exactly, but certain patterns hold true. For example, the candidate who raises the most money in the year before the election (almost always) becomes the nominee. Also, a candidate who does best in the first two voter tests, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, (usually) winds up heading the ticket.

This explains current behavior— the obsession that both Republicans and Democrats have with piling up campaign cash and putting vast time and effort into courting voters in two overwhelmingly white, and disproportionately rural, small states.

But the devil is in those parentheses, above. It’s impossible to know whether 2008 will be one of those years when the old war is the wrong one to fight.

Like politicians, journalists and analysts have a weakness for viewing elections through a backward-looking lens. When something new actually happens, when someone succeeds with a novel approach or confounds conventional wisdom by successfully ignoring old thinking, it’s often clear only in hindsight.

What’s plain, so far, is that there’s been some last war fighting going on.

The most obvious retro-warrior is John McCain. The man who started out as the presumed favorite in the Republican contest may have committed a fatal strategic blunder by taking the wrong lesson from his party’s last nomination race, in 2000, when he got stomped by George W. Bush.

Adopting a join-‘em-if-you-can’t-beat-‘em approach, McCain attempted to become Bush, at least for the purposes of winning the prize that eluded him last time. He aggressively embraced the president’s 2004 re-election, became a cheerleader for the Iraq war, hired top Bush aides to run his campaign and tried to mimic W’s 2000 strategy. The idea: Become the inevitable nominee of a party that has strong royalist tendencies and a solid history of crowning the establishment choice.

That’s how Bush ran the first time, with a front-porch campaign that drew planeloads of Republican nobles to Austin and garnered endorsements from fellow governors, most of whom knew little more than the Bush name and that he’d won re-election in Texas after ousting a Democrat four years earlier.

Instead of becoming the inevitable nominee before the first votes were cast, McCain saw his candidacy all but collapse. His support for an immigration overhaul plan that most Republicans detested and his surprising ineptitude in overseeing the finances of his own campaign had a lot to do with it.

Now, with the race blown wide-open, McCain is trying another last-war strategy: He’s launched a desperate effort to resurrect his candidacy by throwing everything he’s got into New Hampshire. That’s where he upset Bush in the 2000 primary, but this time McCain is facing much tougher terrain, both in the Granite State and those that follow.

McCain’s plunge from the lofty expectations of one year ago, when he held a gala Christmas party in Washington that had the air of a pre-inaugural ball, is still the surprise of the Republican contest. But Rudy Giuliani’s resilience is at least a close second, and if he wins the nomination—no longer an impossibility by any means—it would be a major turning point in national politics.

When the former New York mayor began his run, the smart money in Republican circles, aware of repeated intraparty battles dating back over decades, was convinced that he’d go nowhere. Eyes fixed keenly on the past, the wise guys were sure that a thrice-married candidate who supported abortion rights, gun control and gay rights, to say nothing of resisting crackdowns against illegal immigrants as mayor, didn’t stand a chance in a party where social and religious conservatives play an influential part in nomination politics.

On top of that, Giuliani’s initial strategy flew in the face of conventional wisdom. His aides said Rudy could endure defeats in the early primaries, then come back weeks later when the competition turned to big states where, early polls showed, he was more popular. As analyst Stu Rothenberg has pointed out, Giuliani’s strategy of waiting until Florida’s primary in late January to start a winning streak is a reflection of weakness, rather than strength.

But it’s not a novel idea. Other presidential candidates, largely out of necessity, have tried to get around Iowa and New Hampshire, either by avoiding them completely or making only token efforts in those crucial states, hoping that later victories in the South would carry them to the nomination. No one in the modern era has won that way.

Polls show Mitt Romney, who has the biggest bankroll in the Republican race, leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire, with Mike Huckabee gaining in Iowa. No Republican has ever won both of those early battlegrounds, but every Democrat who did has gone on to head the ticket.

Democrats, meantime, are looking over their shoulders at 2004, when the decisive action in the nomination fight took place in the last few weeks before Iowa voted.

John Kerry, left for dead politically, was forced to mortgage his Boston townhouse to remain viable. He eventually overcame the two presumed front-runners—Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt—and eked out a victory over John Edwards on caucus night.

In a matter of a few weeks, it was all over. Dean’s poll numbers plummeted and Kerry finished him off in New Hampshire. Despite losing to Edwards in South Carolina, Kerry was never seriously challenged after that.

This time, with many Democratic voters saying they could change their mind before the Iowa and New Hampshire tests, what took place last time could well happen again--a final flurry of advertising and campaign charges in Iowa, sharper and more combative than any so far, timed to coincide with last-minute endorsements and a pair of broadcast debates in the state, all leading up to the caucuses on Jan 3.

But the two leading candidates are trying something new--persuading first-time caucus-goers to put them over the top. It is a strategy that candidates frequently talk about---usually insurgents like Dean—but it seldom works.

Barack Obama, this year’s insurgent, is counting on younger voters who are new to the process, a particularly difficult group to mobilize. Hillary Clinton, meantime, is getting strong support from female first-time caucus-goers, many of them older, according to the polls.

If either Clinton or Obama wins big in Iowa, the reason is likely to be the emergence of these "hidden" voters. The upshot could be something truly historic—the first woman or African-American on a national ticket—and a new battle plan for future campaigners to look back on.

Paul West is the Baltimore Sun's bureau chief in Washington. He joined the paper as national political correspondent and has covered every presidential campaign since the 1980s. Before coming to Washington, he was a reporter in Texas and Georgia, where he covered education, the federal courts and local and state government and politics.