In the campaign so far, the Democrats have raised $286 million and the Republicans $218 million, and both are passing the hat with revivalist fervor. Richard Nixon’s daughter, Tricia, seems to have pulled more votes campaigning with Senator McCain than the Kennedy family did for Mr. Obama. Hillary Clinton waxed Mr. Obama and his supporters, the Kennedys, and the Democrats’ last presidential nominee, John Kerry, in their home state of Massachusetts. Surely, the Kennedy mystique and the bunk about Camelot, embodied for decades by a puffy, dissolute senator and a gaggle of toothy Kennedy women, has finally vanished into folklore.

Franklin D. Roosevelt built the modern Democratic Party: a coalition of all minority groups while holding about half of Anglo-Saxon middle class Protestants. It has often degenerated, under his successors, to taking money from those who have earned it, redistributing much of it to those who haven’t, often rather indiscriminately, in exchange for their votes, and just greasing the party’s factions.

The modern Republican Party, created by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, exploited the excesses of the Democratic tactics, called for and produced lower taxes and welfare reform, and waved the flag around rather energetically, even as they wound down the Cold War. The conservative rebels against John McCain will return, as they contemplate the Democratic candidate (either one). Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh will be back, in all their splendid rhetorical prodigality.

It must be said that when far more severely challenged than they had expected, the Clintons have fought back fiercely. The great Clinton machine reached instantly for the brass knuckles, as in Mrs. Clinton’s outrageous reference to the Rezko affair and President Clinton’s assimilation of Mr. Obama to the charlatan Jesse Jackson. The press has largely deserted them and the country clearly has real reservations about putting this duo back into the People’s House. Bill has again been banished by a reproachful wife to the doghouse.

Mr. Obama is a better public speaker than Hillary Clinton, but Mrs. Clinton is a better debater and knows the issues better. She has asked for more debates and can be expected to tear Mr. Obama’s wild and woolly promises of total and benign change to pieces. It looks like it will come down to the super-delegates, ex officio party elders, where the Clintons should have an advantage. The Democratic Party establishment delivered for Hubert Humphrey over Gene McCarthy in 1968 and for Walter Mondale over Gary Hart in 1984, although the underdog outsiders created more excitement, as Mr. Obama has.

I don’t believe John Edwards has any deliverable, loyalist delegates, so it is unlikely to be a multi-ballot convention, but it could be the first suspenseful one in either party since 1968 (Humphrey and Nixon) or 1960 (JFK, LBJ, and Adlai Stevenson) or even 1940 (FDR’s fake third term draft and Willkie, Taft, and Dewey). Mr. Obama has a better online, small donors, fund-raising operation, but Mrs. Clinton and her cock-crowing manager, Terry McAuliffe, are quick studies in political life and death issues. I do not believe her limousine liberal friends in New York and Los Angeles will desert her now.

Governor Huckabee undercut Governor Romney, but he will now vanish. The only states that would tolerate a candidate who trapped and ate squirrels after cooking them on a popcorn-popper, already have voted for Mr. Huckabee. Mr. Romney emulated George Bush Sr. in 1980, and once it became clear that an elderly front-runner (Reagan) had the nomination, he started running for vice president and the succession.

Seven of the 10 vice presidents before Dick Cheney were nominated for president, four achieved the office, and two, Hubert Humphrey and Albert Gore, lost by a hair’s breadth (if Gore really lost at all). Despite Mr. Romney’s commendable effort to take the second place from Mr. Huckabee, Michael Bloomberg and Condoleezza Rice might be stronger nominees for vice president.

Mr. Romney presciently said he was withdrawing to ensure the strongest possible Republican resistance to the “surrender to terror” he imputed to both Democratic candidates. There is little chance that the correlation of forces in Iraq will not continue to improve for the United States and enable a pre-election force reduction, and the Democrats will pay a price for trying to scuttle the effort as they did in Vietnam (having plunged the country into an unconstitutional war with a draftee army in the first place). The war will be a comparative Republican plus-point; the U.S. doesn’t like losing wars.

If Mr. Bush plus Ben Bernanke, the incomprehensible (except when he slices interest rates) central banker, and Treasury Secretary Paulson, who last week claimed to see “21 million people approaching the trough,” can prevent the economy from crumpling before election day, Mr. McCain should win. He will be the candidate of the over-60s, the veterans, the Archie Bunker hard-hats, the comfortable Republican suburbs, and the gender traditionalists of both sexes, who will be impressed by Mr. McCain’s attractive and poised wife, (who has been paying most of his bills for the last 20 years.) He will also be the candidate of comparative integrity and demonstrated patriotism. After five years as the uninvited wartime guest of the North Vietnamese, he is entitled to that at least.

This will be the last president born before 1960. The campaign to be the next president after the candidate elected this year will start before Inauguration Day in January, and will cost over $1 billion. Only in America.

Lord Black is the author of “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom” and “Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.”