Gaining on the outside

ALL the fizz aside, new media have the capacity to create distinctions with a difference.

National politics is one of the places where that may be occurring, and that's a possibility to which, in Mrs. Willy Loman's unforgettable words, "attention must be paid," especially by the country's news media.

Consider the odd situation in which both the Republican and Democratic parties now find themselves as the presidential election cycle spins into formal earnest. Both parties have fields of aspiring chief executives so large that you need a program to sort them out.

Have you watched either party's so-called debates? If that many people were crammed onto a Wilshire Boulevard bus at rush hour, the MTA would be looking at another federal lawsuit. There's no way to account for the size of this presidential field without admitting that we've become a nation in which narcissistic grandiosity is epidemic.

And who are these people?

Does responsible citizenship now require that we actually figure out what Ron Paul thinks about serious things? Is everybody really supposed to forget that the first time Dennis J. Kucinich held executive office, Cleveland -- which had elected him mayor -- became the first municipality since the Great Depression to declare bankruptcy?

In the Kabuki theater of conventional national politics to which such questions belong, there are answers but no convincing explanations -- and that's particularly so if you look to most conventional political journalism to help you find the way forward.

What's really interesting about this particular moment in our nation's electoral life is that neither the Republican nor the Democratic candidates currently generating much of the interest and enthusiasm have formally declared. Both, in fact, have made themselves forces to be reckoned with by standing outside the formalized political process and communicating with voters through new and alternative media rather than traditional political journalism.

We're speaking, of course, of former Sen. Fred Thompson, a Tennessee Republican, and Oscar darling -- incidentally, ex-vice president of the United States -- Al Gore, a Democrat. Both have held themselves apart from the predictable give-and-take of national primary politics and yet both remain every bit a force in this season's campaign. It's true, of course, that the conventional front-runners -- Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democratic side and Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney in the GOP column -- have substantial fundraising edges. Money counts, but a significant number of political pros think Thompson and Gore quickly could close the gap if they stepped into the race.