ANCHESTER, N.H. - The second look may be a sharper look.
In the next 30 days, the pace of the presidential campaign will accelerate, the airwaves will be dominated by appeals and put-downs, the candidates will come into ever sharper relief - and caucus-goers in Iowa and primary voters in New Hampshire will weigh the options, and will discover the candidates anew.
They will look at Al Gore and remember that they were told he was wooden, a stick figure, only to find him more human, more vulnerable, more needy - needy for their approval, and needy for their vote - than they had ever expected of a 51-year-old man of accomplishment and erudition who had won election to the House, Senate, and vice presidency and now wants to graduate to the White House.
They will look at George W. Bush and remember that they were told he was smooth but shallow, only to find him more searching, more nuanced, more sophisticated than they expected from a man who glided through life without a care if not carelessly, and then blithely took his apprenticeship in politics as the governor of the second-largest state in the nation.
They will look at Bill Bradley and remember that they were told he was boring, a drone, a pampered overachiever used to being at the center of attention, only to find that he has an uncanny ability to make the audience, not the speaker, the center of attention, and that the touchstone of this Princeton and Oxford figure is not formality but informality.
They will look at John McCain and remember that they were told he was unpredictable, even tempestuous, only to find that his iron sense of discipline will always return the conversation to his advantage (his desire for political reform) and that his manner is easy, approachable, even warm.
They will look at Steve Forbes and remember that they were told that he was an upper-class toff, more interested in the capital-gains tax and horse breeding than in the prosaic concerns of life, only to find that he is tough, uncompromising, gritty - and fluent in international diplomacy.
They will look at all the candidates - these five plus three more Republicans, Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, and Senator Orrin G. Hatch - and wonder if they really know them at all.
Six months ago, when the Jan. 24 Iowa caucuses and the Feb. 1 New Hampshire primary seemed an eternity away, the presidential campaign was dominated by a vice president known mostly as a loyal subordinate and by a governor who was known, if at all, for his congeniality. And it shaped up as a sterile struggle between Gore and Bush, two famous sons of two famous political fathers.
Now the presidential nomination races are different - they really have turned into contests, not coronations - and the candidates are emerging from their caricatures.
But as much as the campaign has changed in the past several months, it will change even more in the next several weeks.
Until now, the presidential race has belonged to the few - the candidates, their paid advisers, a handful of volunteers, a horde of reporters, commentators, editors, and technicians. From here on out, the presidential race will belong to the many - the workers and the wealthy, the stockboys and the stockbrokers, the farmers and the financiers.
And, history shows, once the public gets involved - once Americans wrestle the political choices away from the political class - all the assumptions, all the expectations, change.
Now begins not only the moment of decision, but also the moment of discovery.
''In Iowa and New Hampshire, people's attention is about to be magnified, maybe out of proportion,'' said Steven Parker, a political scientist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. ''In other places, politics is now the tiniest of ripples in an ocean that has changed dramatically. But in Iowa and New Hampshire, this will be the biggest show in town, and the intensity is going to grow.''
Right now the public has only the vaguest familiarity with the presidential candidates, their positions, their lives, their outlooks, their motivations. A study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania released late last month found that ''the public is still learning'' some of the details ''the elites take for granted,'' adding: ''At this stage of the presidential campaign, most Americans do not even recognize the names of many of the contenders. Many people who do recognize a candidate's name do not feel they know enough to express a favorable or unfavorable opinion about him.''
So unfamiliar with the candidates are the American people that, according to the study, ''no single impression of any presidential candidate is widely held by the public.''
McCain has been one of the dominant figures in the campaign, and his rise to his status as the most prominent challenger to the GOP front-runner was perhaps the leading political story of the autumn. Even so, less than half the American people profess to have any familiarity with him at all - and only about a third know he is a senator. Indeed, only two Americans in five know that Bradley, whose rise is the other major political story of the fall, once played professional basketball.
Nor are the public's views of key campaign issues any stronger. A Pew Research Center poll taken last month showed that few Americans could associate candidates with their principal policy proposals.
For all the attention to McCain's crusade against the campaign-finance system, only 11 percent knew that McCain was associated with an overhaul of the system, with 10 percent associating that issue with Bush, who has not made it a staple of his campaign.
''These findings are important, but people learn quickly, or at least make up their minds quickly,'' said James Chace, a Bard College professor whose Dean Acheson biography has been a subject of discussion in Republican debates.
''They look at these people and decide that they're tired, or they've been around, or something else. People's decisions are complicated, but it comes down to leadership and good judgment. People never know exactly who has those things, but they try to figure out who does - and often they are right.''
Through the imperfect prisms of politics - debates where the premium is on pugilism, advertisements where cold calculations portray candidates as warm and fuzzy, campaign events where the audience often consists of the committed more than the casual or the curious - tens of thousands of the people of Iowa and New Hampshire are about to draw the conclusions that will shape the contest.
There is a good chance that they will look at the candidates, and that they will find their choice determined by an old word with a new meaning: character.
In the recent past, that word has been a proxy for marital fidelity and personal stability. When commentators spoke of the ''character issue'' involving Senator Gary W. Hart of Colorado, the Democratic contender in 1984 and 1988, they really meant his reputation for womanizing. But when people speak of character in 2000, they mean something else entirely.
''The general public is a little more into judging the candidates by moral and religious characteristics than professors and reporters do,'' said David Siemers, a political scientist at Colorado College. ''The president is uniquely positioned to lead in a moral sense, and most of the time the public knows that. Voters try candidates on for size that way.''
The candidates sense that is exactly what is going on right now.
''The electorate thinks in terms of bringing honor and dignity to the office of the presidency, it thinks in terms of trustworthiness, that a candidate intends to do what he says he will do, that he can stand tough, make decisions,'' Bush said in an interview.
One of the reasons the two presidential races seem so close in New Hampshire is that voters have been reluctant to choose among them in those areas. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll of New Hampshire voters showed that at least 71 percent of Granite State likely voters consider Bush, McCain, Gore, and Bradley to be strong leaders and to have the kind of personality and temperament it takes to serve effectively as president. At least 79 percent of the state's likely primary voters consider all four of them honest and trustworthy.
''Pretty soon the people who turn up at caucuses in Iowa or vote in the primary in New Hampshire will have very definite views,'' said Parker, the Nevada political scientist. ''The television advertisements will do that. But so will the press, as it puts these guys under the microscope.''
