David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief political strategist, said last October that campaigns are like “an MRI for the soul—whoever you are, eventually people find out.” It could well have been meant as a warning, delivered with that surprisingly soft voice and sad eyes, for the Republican nominee, frequently described by Obama’s operatives as coreless. But during the debate on October 3, the president’s pursed-lipped diffidence and downward gaze in the presence of a newly forceful challenger turned the observation on its head. Now a different candidate was being scanned: Who was that person on the stage who we thought was the president? For Obama folks, the race-altering debate brought to mind a more painful medical procedure—like opening a vein.

And so we now have another excruciating election, with blame raining down like convention confetti. Campaigns are, famously, exactly as dysfunctional as the people leading them. The ups and downs of vital economic signs—unemployment at 7.8 percent, rejoice!—are important indicators, but campaigns turn as often on human moments, stray words, and gestures that reveal character. Not a rational system. And yet it’s the human drama that is the reason we watch—and suffering through the flaws of the protagonists is why we also can’t wait for it to be over.

Elections are a joyful, painful, deeply neurotic family conversation—democracy is one word for it. In October every four years, people are losing their minds. You can count on the fact that certain people (we mean you, Andrew Sullivan) will become hair-tearingly angry and distraught, others giddy to the point of hypomania over a bad night or a slip of the tongue or a statistical report from some heartland state that will be thoroughly expunged from coastal consciousness when the election is over. The Internet has supercharged these anxieties. With a Twitter feed, the thrills and chills arrive in two-minute intervals, driving a new barrage of questions: How is Ryan’s Medicare message playing in Florida? Whose idea were those Big Bird commercials? What’s happening in Ohio?

Everyone is a consultant nowadays, can parse the likely-versus-registered numbers in the latest polls, and sketch the various paths to victory in the electoral college. But for all the democracy that the Internet has brought, presidential politics at its core is still a parochial little familial world. It’s not much bigger than a smallish school—and just as exclusive and cliquey. Everyone knows everyone else, speaks the same language, shares the same cynicism, has much more in common with each other than with outsiders who just happen to share their ideology. Past elections never really go away. Crucial campaign turning points, those jujitsu moments, like the Swiftboating of John Kerry, when a candidate’s strength is turned into a weakness, are reworked and reconfigured to serve current purpose. It’s an art and craft that’s been passed down from generation to generation.
This issue is about the through lines of American politics. Some of these lines are charted in "The Forever Campaign". An eight-page rapid survey of the past half-century of campaigns plots these continuities, pursuing memes and tracing lineages, reinforcing just how small the extended family of politics really is. Similarly, in the past few months, at both parties’ conventions and out on the campaign trail, our staff photographer, Christopher Anderson, has been putting together a political family album.

Within this family, of course, there really are families—a hereditary governing class seems to be as American as apple pie. Two of the stories in this issue, John Heilemann’s “Bill and Hillary Forever” and Joe Hagan’s “Bush in the Wilderness,” explore America’s most important legacy families—and their interactions with the candidates on the ballot this year—refurbishing their political houses as they prepare for a possible meeting in 2016. Heilemann explores the complex transaction between the Clintons and the Obama administration—one that is crucial to Obama’s reelection, and possibly to Hillary Clinton’s chances in 2016.

But there are also forces larger than personality, currents of ideology that flow over centuries. Frank Rich argues that the goverment-loathing animus present at the republic’s founding, and in glorious display for the past two years, is America’s defining ideology. It is why, he believes, the right wing will always win in the end.

Does that mean this election has no consequences? Oh, no. But exactly what these consequences may be is, often by design, far from clear. Jonathan Chait’s story, “November 7th,” charts what may happen on that Cinderella moment when the campaign’s poetry (such as it is this year) is transformed into the prose of governing and why our expectations about the agendas of an Obama second term or a Romney presidency are liable to be upended in fairly dramatic terms. Right now, of course, November 7 seems like an eternity away. The election may be in only three weeks, but the joyful agony of the home stretch is just beginning. read more [+]