ASHINGTON - There has never been a presidential election year like this one.
The 1944 election was held in the 36th month of World War II. The 1952 election was held in the 29th month of the Korean War. The 1980 election was held in the 15th month of captivity of the American hostages in Iran.
This week's South Carolina primary, perhaps the most important confrontation of the Republican nomination fight in the 2000 election, is being held in the 107th month of expansion in the American economy.
And as the presidential campaign moves south and west we are witnessing the development of an entirely new brand of politics in this time of plenty. Call it the politics of prosperity: a new American dialogue that omits most of the big issues of traditional politics, including the economy and foreign policy, and instead emphasizes issues that have been at the periphery, such as campaign-finance overhaul and education.
The confrontations between the wealthy and the striving, the fights over national priorities in times of limited resources, the struggles over how (or whether) to cushion the vulnerable from the vicissitudes of the marketplace - all these, the staples of American politics, have been swept off the table by the comforting breeze of prosperity.
''There's still poverty and there's still inequality, but it's a very strong economy and it's hard to run against the economy,'' says Robert Feinberg, an American University economist. ''With the exception of some extreme views, there's very little criticism of the Fed, very little criticism of the thrust of Clinton's economic policy, very little to complain about.''
Nobody's complaining, for example, about inflation, which is at 2.7 percent. Unemployment, which was at 7.3 percent when Bill Clinton was elected, is at 4.1 percent now as the nation prepares to select his successor. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sits above 10,500 - more than three times higher than the 3,301 level it hit in 1992.
''If you asked anyone when this recovery began in 1992 what the chances were of getting the unemployment rate down to around 4 percent, they would have laughed their heads off,'' says Frank Levy, an MIT economist. ''They would say that even if you could get that low, which you couldn't, you'd have high inflation. Well, we did get that low, and we don't have that inflation.''
For that reason, the men struggling to win the attention and votes of Americans in the early primary states are also struggling to fashion a new kind of politics. In this politics of prosperity, all the guideposts of the past have been removed, all the navigational buoys have drifted, all the assumptions have been altered.
''This great prosperity allows people to talk about things like Elian Gonzalez and concentrate on more particularized issues like education and health,'' says Tamu Buhr, a political scientist at Harvard University. ''There are a whole bunch of things you don't have to focus on, like jobs. Instead you can talk about cutting taxes.''
The politics of prosperity calls upon Americans to make no sacrifices; in President Clinton's State of the Union address last month, in the budget he presented last week, and in the appeals of all the Democratic and Republican hopefuls in Iowa and New Hampshire and, now, South Carolina and the West, there is no call for selflessness, no incantation about the future dividends that present sacrifices will bring.
The politics of prosperity includes only the most casual nods to the concerns of the poor; even the Democrats, traditionally the voice of the underdogs, are pitching their stump speeches to suburban, middle-class voters.
The politics of prosperity, moreover, has become the politics of politics. This is the rare election year when the conversation is dominated not by what politics is for (creating economic growth, for example, or easing the burden of poverty) but by how we conduct politics - whether the ads are negative (a big issue last week in South Carolina) or whether a candidate's supporters are rude (a question raised in New Hampshire), or whether the big interests get too much influence (one of the chief issues in Iowa last month).
Indeed, the principal issue in 2000 may well be campaign financing, which is a classic prosperity issue, one that may ultimately involve the distribution of wealth but more immediately involves the distribution of power.
The insurgent Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, has made an overhaul of the campaign-finance system his leading issue, and though Bill Bradley, himself a former senator from New Jersey, has tried to make campaign-finance his ticket to the Democratic nomination, even Vice President Al Gore, a prodigious fund-raiser under Clinton, has positioned himself as a strong advocate of changing the system.
Issues such as this have been in the purview of modern American politics, but never at the center. Common Cause, the self-styled citizens' lobby, tried to make special-interest money a dominant issue in 1988 without much success, and when pickets pestered GOP Senator Bob Dole of Kansas about blocking an overhaul of the campaign-finance system, he was able to dismiss the criticism with ease.
The healthy economy has provided a vacuum in the political arena that is being filled by these other issues. A decade ago, only 27 percent of the nation believed it was financially better off than a year earlier. Now the figure is 53 percent. A decade ago, half of Americans thought that economic conditions in the nation were getting worse, as against a third who believed that conditions were getting better. Right now, those figures are reversed, with a third believing things are getting worse and a half believing conditions are improving.
''The fact that things are going well means people don't have to focus just on themselves,'' says Fred Wertheimer, a former Common Cause president. ''The fights in the 1980s were much different from the fights now in 2000. The dimension of the big-money problem is much larger now, of course, but the harder the economic times, the less willing people are to listen to things that don't relate directly to economics. With better times, they can look at the things that need to be dealt with but sometimes aren't.''
As a result, the landscape is almost completely altered. A dozen years ago, Governor Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts won the Democratic nomination with a promise of ''good jobs at good wages,'' a phrase that would seem quaintly out of place on the campaign trail today. Democrats don't have to make vows like that anymore, or at least right now.
''Even though things were pretty good in 1988, there were whole regions of the country that were in terrible shape,'' says Dukakis, who is teaching this semester at UCLA. ''Remember the Rust Belt? South Texas was in trouble. Huge parts of the country were not sharing in prosperity. There was a lot for a Democrat to talk about in 1988. There's less for a Republican challenger in 2000 to talk about.''
The low level of enthusiasm for that basic GOP chestnut, lowering taxes, is a measure of the difficulty that Republicans face in the new atmosphere - and helps to explain the success McCain enjoyed in New Hampshire and the surge he is experiencing in South Carolina.
''It makes it hard for the Republicans, because they're usually in the position of saying they're the party that can bring the economy back to where it should be,'' says Ann Crigler, a political scientist at the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. ''They can't say that this time, because it's going gangbusters. But if things turn bad, they'll take full advantage of it.''
In these good times, the traditional tactics just aren't working. Texas Governor George W. Bush emphasized his tax-cut plan in the most tax-averse state in the nation, New Hampshire, and still lost the primary by 19 percentage points. Only 1 in 10 of McCain's supporters in New Hampshire identified a tax cut as their top priority.
As a result, the candidates have been emphasizing education, health, veteran and social issues - topics that have seldom been at the heart of a presidential election. The Republicans sought to make education important in 1988, for example, but it was crowded out by issues of government spending and reducing the tax on capital gains. The Democrats began to make health insurance an issue in 1992, but turned to the economy and the deficit.
Only now is a new politics of prosperity blossoming. The robustness of the economy, and the absence of foreign threats, have given those formerly lesser issues breathing room - and national attention.
