THE NEWCOMER.(Senator John Edwards may be gearing to run for president in 2004)

The 2004 Democratic Presidential campaign began more or less officially a few weekends ago, at the state conference of the Florida Democratic Party, in Orlando. So many Democrats are already running flat out for President that it was a relief to have the race come out into the open. Al Gore was to speak at the conference, and the advance word was that it would be his most politically partisan speech since the 2000 election. Gore's appearance, at such a resonant location, dominated the conference, and on a lengthy bill of speakers he got the best time slot, midday on Saturday. (In fact, because things were running late several speakers were bumped to make room for him.) Most of the political talent on display mingled casually with the conference-goers, but Gore maintained the charged scarcity that befits a top act.

He appeared onstage after a dramatic buildup. Florida's junior senator, Bill Nelson, introduced him. The public-address system played a thumping rock anthem. Many of the delegates held up signs that said "Still Gore Country!" People were standing on chairs and chanting, "We want Gore!"and "Gore in four!" And the prospect of seeing Gore emerge, after more than a year of what John Updike once called (in another context) a "meaningful silence," was indeed exciting. It made for a good illustration of the power of branding: Gore is the most famous Democrat after Bill Clinton; he comes loaded with emotions.

The kind of speech that Gore gave is an art form with a lot of rules, like the sonnet. You have to be relatively brief--half an hour is the limit. You have to devote a good portion of that time to a series of required rhetorical exercises: You have to thank your introducer for that generous introduction. You have to praise your spouse and children. (Praising your mama and daddy is optional.) You have to tell a humorous story about yourself, which involves your falling prey to some hint of pretension and being deftly deflated. You have to thank the Party's leading figures and express the hope that the entire ticket is victorious in the fall.

You have to say that you can feel the energy in the room. You have to insist that you stand foursquare with President Bush in the war against terrorism. You have to express concern, however, about prescription-drug costs and the long-term health of Social Security and Medicare, and call for smaller class sizes in public schools. You have to tell an Arthur Andersen joke and, because of the location, a Disney World joke. You may, if you wish, strip off your suit jacket midway through your speech, when you really get going, but you may not remove your necktie. During this portion of the speech, you may also initiate a call-and-response routine with the audience, in which it shouts the same answer three or four times to a series of questions posed by you. You have to end with a call for restoring the American dream. When you're done, you have to bask in the glow of the audience's applause, raising your arms above your head, palms forward, in a gesture that expresses something between triumph and self-effacement.

Gore has been a politician for a long time now--he made his first race for office at the age of twenty-eight (he's now fifty-four)--and, if you count his Vice-Presidential campaigns, 2004 would be his fifth-in-a-row quadrennial national political campaign. He knows how to do the required stuff. In Orlando, he used the time left over to deliver a critique of George W. Bush's Presidency, focussing almost entirely on domestic issues. Gore has always given the impression of being much more interested in government policy than most politicians, and in Florida you got the more specific impression that he has been watching Bush very closely. His talk was salted with well-turned jokes and lines meant to be received as slashing, but he also criticized Bush for abandoning the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and obliterating the federal budget surplus and underfunding education and having no real health plan--and you could feel the audience's interest die a little with every specific.

Twice during the speech, Gore quoted Winston Churchill, the patron saint of indomitable people--the second time for his windup line, which was "Never never never give up!" Gore is running.

At an event like the Florida Dem-ocratic conference, you see that Presidential candidates sit atop a big pyramid: there are layers of politicians, people who catch the bug early (or inherit it from a parent) and spend their lives running. They were all over the ...