In their quest for evermore cash

for their political war chests,

Clinton and Obama are doing

a pretty good job of wearing each other down

There's the possibility of them

being passed on the outside by Edwards,

Richardson, or even a late-entry Gore

The Dark Horse?
[A candidate for office, more especially for the presidency,
who is not prominent, but wins the race because the leading
candidates succeed only in defeating each other.]

All the attention's been on

the staggering amounts of cash

the Obama and Clinton machines have generated

But a couple below-par performances

in the early contests by either of these candidates

could render the year-long pre-primary

cash-padding process largely an irrelevance

America's media is increasingly reducing the Democratic primary season to a contest between Obama and Clinton, with a host of small-to-big nuisance candidates on the margins.

Pundits tend to ridicule Kucinich, ignore Biden or Dodd, and, generally, while they'll give Edwards or Richardson far more respect, they tend not to give them much more than a snowball in hell's chance of winning the presidential nomination.

Come February 6th, goes the message, after the slew of early primaries it'll be a two-horse race and the rest will all be relegated to footnote status.

Here's why I think there's a better-than-even chance the pundits are wrong:

In their quest for evermore cash for their political war chests, Clinton and Obama are doing a pretty good job of wearing each other down - or of, at a minimum, replacing raw public enthusiasm for their campaigns with the more mundane emotion of genial familiarity.

This may increase the possibility of them being passed on the outside by Edwards, Richardson, or, conceivably, a late-entry Al Gore.

I guess it's even possible someone else could launch their own surge, though at this point I doubt it.

All the attention's been on the staggering amounts of cash the Obama and Clinton machines have generated; but a couple below-par performances in the early contests by either of these candidates could render the year-long pre-primary cash-padding process largely an irrelevance.

After all, when expectations are as high as they are for Obama and Clinton, there's really very little room for a flop.

This year, there are new early caucus and primary states: Nevada and South Carolina.

While Iowa and New Hampshire have traditionally had the early field to themselves, now a western state with a strong libertarian streak and a populist southern state (as opposed to simply a die-hard conservative, a.k.a. Mississippi-type state) will have a say right at the start of the voting season.

And it strikes me the media has grievously underreported these regions - and, more particularly, deeply under-covered the tiny fraction of people in each of these states who will turn up to vote in the caucus or primary and thus genuinely influence the winnowing of the field.

The men and women who make up Nevada and South Carolina's politically engaged community aren't stupid - in fact you'll often find their take on the world to be strikingly nuanced.

But they don't necessarily have the same set of priorities as voters in Iowa or New Hampshire - in Nevada, for example, hotbed issues are nuclear waste, water, the loss of open land to urban sprawl, and immigration.

In the Carolinas, a protectionist economic message frequently hits home -- not to mention the media hubs of the East and West coasts.

Howard Dean's 50-state strategy -- the organizing method of treating each state as if it is politically competitive in general elections, and, in doing so, making the premise somewhat self-fulfilling -- might actually have the secondary effect of making the primary process itself more competitive.

Head out into the hinterlands these days, six months before a single caucus or primary vote will be cast, and even states like Nevada are crawling with operatives from all the big candidates, and with enthused party officials counting down the days till primary season.

That's a startling change from the sluggish Democratic approach in these remote states even four years ago.

While conventional wisdom has the February 5th superprimary essentially ending the competitive primary season two weeks after it begins -- or rather ratifying an informal frontrunner selection process that started in early 2007 -- it's at least possible the exact opposite will occur.

With a more staggered, or "normal" primary season, after four or five big races if you're a voter in a left-over state you pretty much know your realistic choice of candidate has been narrowed down to two, maybe three individuals.

And so you make the best of what you're left with. But, if half the states vote on February 5th, all the voters in those states will be voting blind, without the knowledge of how other ballots have been cast, in other words from their hearts rather than through sheer political calculation.

Thus there's at least a chance that, when pundits wake up on February 6th, they'll realize several different candidates won big states the day before and are still viable.

Maybe it'll break regionally, with Richardson winning big in the West, Edwards capturing populist Southern and Midwestern States, Obama and Clinton winning big in the coasts and scoring decently in the mid-West.

On the other hand maybe the results will defy a geographical logic, reliant far more on the skills of individual campaign operatives in each state.

Either way, if the delegates scatter to three, four, or even five main candidates, then the second half of the primary campaign will actually be far more competitive than it's been in the recent past.

Opening up the possibility of the drama of a deadlocked Denver convention, perhaps even allowing a stand-aloof Gore to be "drafted" in at the last minute. I'm not saying that this will happen, just that it's not totally improbable.

Finally, there's a strange undercurrent of both intense unease and dissatisfaction with the country's direction - one felt by GOP voters as well as Democrats -- and also an almost uncontainable Democratic Party optimism in many locales.

This combination is leading to a more fiery, nascently populist, politics on the Democratic side. It's a language the "leading" candidates are actually less comfortable with than are Edwards and Richardson (and some of the lesser candidates).

Witness Edwards' current Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King-inspired anti-poverty tour throughout near-catatonically depressed regions of America. And it's one that might come to play havoc with traditional political calculations.

None of this is to say Clinton and Obama are in any way fading. Not at all. All else being equal, they're clearly the man and woman of the moment, the big cheeses, the guy and gal to beat.

But it is to say, these are early days. There's a lot of road left still for these marathon runners to pound, a lot of campaigning from the heart still to be done.

Not just in the big media hubs but in the out-of-the way towns and counties nationwide that, in this election in particular, are going to play such a huge role in the selection process.

Sasha Abramsky @ CIF