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Few predicted any of this, but at least one politician sensed that something of this type might be coming as long ago as shortly after the close of the 1998 congressional elections. A newly retired Newt Gingrich told me over breakfast in Beverly Hills, Calif., one day that "the most remarkable result of the '98 campaign, which everyone should be studying, is Jesse Ventura's victory in Minnesota. Nationwide, Democrats and Republicans turned out a combined 35 percent of registered voters. But in Minnesota, 60 percent of the electorate came out to vote. In the last week before the election, Ventura registered more supporters for his Reform Party effort than either Democrats or Republicans were able to do, separately, over the entire campaign."

Gingrich's point was that Ventura had tapped an enormous reservoir of political discontent in the American heartland, a silent electorate that was prepared to lift its voice for a maverick politician if it felt that its votes might really count.

David Horowitz David Horowitz's column appears on the News site every other Monday. + Biography + Archives

To be fair, most of the commentators and strategists who failed to see the McCain phenomenon coming thought that the independent/reform vote would find its home in the Reform Party this year. They failed to appreciate how much the Reform Party is the captive of a Texas ego and a Marxist-Leninist sect. Or to foresee that this cabal would force Jesse Ventura himself to leave the party, sending most of the independent vote right through the open doors of the reformed primaries and back inside the two major parties themselves.

Gingrich somewhat misgauged the Ventura phenomenon, as well. The former speaker thought that the support for Ventura was the result of his bold stance against government bureaucracy and for tax cuts. In fact, the charisma of the Ventura campaign lay in the candidate himself, whose heterodoxy, candor and accessibility suggested that he was a man of the people, a man you could count on to buck the system and someone you could trust.

This is precisely the formula of the McCain candidacy -- and not by accident. McCain went to Minnesota with his top aide to study the Ventura campaign when he was preparing his own run.

McCain's openness and off-the-cuff informality, his war-hero persona and readiness to challenge his own party, plus his decision to grant "uncontrolled access" to a potentially hostile press are the key elements that have enabled to him to gain his present momentum. By contrast, the front-runner strategy that Texas Gov. George W. Bush pursued through the New Hampshire primary had him sticking to a script, controlling the media, mobilizing the party establishment and presenting himself as an irresistible force.

These all seemed like reasonable choices at the time, but they had the effect of setting Bush up as the system candidate -- the perfect foil for the McCain insurgency he now faces. The resulting electoral reversals have provoked a re-thinking of the Bush strategy and a re-shaping of his campaign. It has made the race even more exciting than this year's Super Bowl, and it's not over yet.

One irony of this electoral moment is the way McCain's upsurge has undermined the very issue that had provided the original fuel for his candidacy -- campaign-finance reform. Probably there was no greater conventional wisdom early on in these contests than that money, in the end, would be the decisive factor. As the Washington Post's Kevin Merida put it just after the Iowa caucuses, when four Republican hopefuls -- some with 20 years experience in the electoral process -- had already dropped out: "George Bush, it could be argued, has scared them all off. And not a single vote in an actual election has been counted."

Indeed, that was the complaint of pundits and candidates alike. Wow, were they wrong!

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