2008 will be the real thing: No obvious heir; no V.P. with inside track; no "likely candidate."

Excerpts from The New York Times, 01-21-05:

For the past half-century, there has been a reliable political dynamic at every presidential inauguration. Someone on the platform - usually the president or the vice president - had already emerged as the party's likely candidate for an election that was still four years away.

Which is what made the scene outside the Capitol here on Thursday morning so unusual. For the first time since the inaugural of 1949, the president and vice president were considered to be at the end of their elective political careers.

At the same moment, Democrats, thoroughly out of power in Congress, are adrift in their search for a leader, much less a candidate for 2008, after a debilitating loss in November.

"If you go back and look, 2008 will be the first election in modern times when there is no heir apparent on either side," said Matthew Dowd, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Bush's presidential campaign. "It's amazing. It's a happenstance of history."

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat who has been mentioned as a potential candidate for 2008, said: "You have a totally wide-open field with no leading candidate and no 800-pound gorillas on each side. You're seeing generation changes in both parties, and you're seeing totally new faces emerge."

While this turn of events has repercussions for both parties, it has particularly strong implications for Mr. Bush and his party for the next four years. Mr. Bush and the Republican Party are sailing into the kind of choppy waters that are usually associated with Democrats, who by this point are quite accustomed to extended public battles over ideology and issues.

[O]fficials in both parties said that the next four years might be a lot easier if there was an heir apparent. Without an obvious heir, the ideological fissures in his party that Mr. Bush has managed to bridge so well could rupture, causing the kind of debates Republicans have avoided for nearly 30 years.

"I believe that '08 is going to be a mess for them, and Bush is going to be held accountable for them," said Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman.

Not that Democrats are in much better shape. Asked to name the leading candidate in his own party, Mr. McAuliffe paused and said, "We're going to have a big open field."

Republicans face the rare combination of a second-term president and a vice president who has no interest in running for office again. From Richard M. Nixon in 1956 to Al Gore in 1996, vice presidents have been viewed as having the inside track.

Mr. Dowd, who is coming off of what was widely viewed as one of the more dramatic elections of recent times, argued that 2008 might actually prove more consequential.

"This is going to be an interesting election," he said. "I think 2008 will tell us the answer to the question of what direction each party is heading, and which way the country is going. 2008 will be the real thing."