Listen not to the winds of conventional wisdom.
American politics has a sturdy landscape of its own.

FRANCONIA NOTCH, N.H.- Don’t shudder at that New Hampshire dateline. I’m not about to tell you that the presidential candidates are climbing over themselves in preparation for the first presidential primary. They’re not.

I’m the one who’s been doing some climbing – up to the Kinsman Ridge, far from any coffee shop or veterans’ hall likely to be taken over by a politician and a camera crew. For up here in the White Mountains, you can often gain some perspective.

It’s 30 months until the New Hampshire primary – I can sense you’re breathing easier already – and it’s about 18 months before the shock troops of presidential politics will begin packing their kit bags for the Granite State. But the political atmosphere is already being set: Worries about the war in Iraq. Concerns about terrorism. Lingering doubts about the economy. Fear about nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea.

Those are the obvious things, apparent at sea level. But take a walk in the quiet woods of New Hampshire, and you may discover that there’s a splendid lesson about the political world in the physical world. In the high-mountain bogs of this state – take the setting as the metaphor it is meant to be – there are many wildflowers and berries, plus all manner of tamaracks. There are wild blue herons (I saw one, in bearing more regal than a postcolonial despot king, just after 8 the other morning) and evidence of moose (the biggest mammals in the forest) and the ubiquitous traces of the beaver (at once the most industrious and most intelligent of the arboreal beasts).

But it took a wise, trained eye for someone to point out to me the round-leaved sundew. I have walked happily in these hills since I was a boy – mountain fastnesses that attracted the interest and affection of many outsiders, including Thoreau, Frost, and Hawthorne – but only this week, in a wet ravine, did I see this carnivorous plant (please do not miss this metaphor either). This is surprising, given that the round leaved sundew is red in a sea of browns and greens, but Drosera roundifolia is one of those surface features that is almost invisible to the eye – that is, until you see it, and then it seems unavoidable altogether. You cannot escape it.

So if you are here with me along the trail (another metaphor; this time we’re in the shadow of the shoulder of massive Cannon Mountain, crossing the bog bridges and passing the wood sorrel and the golden thread, and the Indian pipe), let’s have a look at the round-leaved sundew of American politics. (Only in nature do its sticky red hairs capture its prey of gnats, dragonflies, and butterflies.) It has been invisible to us all this time, but once we see it we will find its logic, and its beauty, unavoidable.

In the next dozen months or so you will hear a lot about the wild blue heron and the moose and even the beaver of the Republican Party, about how impressive and regal they are, about how heavy and fearsome they are, about how intelligent and industrious they are. (If, as your imagination races ahead on the trail and you envision Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, John S. McCain of Arizona, and Bill Frist of Tennessee in your mountain menagerie, who am I to doubt your vision?) Savor the view. It is not every day you see a heron along a glacial lake, a moose on a leafy byway, a beaver in his frantic factory of leaves and branches.

But mind the round-leaved sundew, because in the Republican reaches of this forest there is an invisible and inescapable force that speaks of nature – of the nature of the Republican Party: Try and avoid it as you like, but after successful (i.e., two-term) presidencies, Republicans always nominate members of the same species, politically speaking, as their reigning leader. This may seem startling given how much the GOP has (here comes an incendiary word from the world of nature as applied to politics) evolved in the postwar period. But if you go back in geologic time (all the way back, for the purposes of this metaphor, to the turn of the last century), you will see that the Republican Party is a mix of Darwin and intelligent design.

The GOP changes only after disaster and tragedy. Otherwise it becomes more like itself. The party underwent a sea change with the death of William McKinley and the ascendancy of Theodore Roosevelt, but after TR served most of two terms, the party was handed to the man Roosevelt regarded as his genetic twin, William Howard Taft. The Republicans therefore passed from Ohio rum punch to New England cider sobriety when Warren Harding died and Calvin Coolidge took over, and when that two-term period finished, the nomination fell to a member of the Harding-Coolidge junto, Herbert Hoover.

Watch how nature duplicates itself. Ronald Reagan served for two terms, followed by his own vice president of eight years, George H.W. Bush. The two big changes of the postwar years came after the disaster of Watergate (which brought on the new conservatism of Reagan) and the interruption of what the Republicans have come to regard as their natural ascendancy represented by Bill Clinton (which brought on the even newer conservatism of George W. Bush).

So what does this tell us about the period we are entering, when W is setting and when the new north star has yet to appear in the firmament?

It tells us that the Republican nomination will very likely fall not to someone with bold new ideas, not to someone with a soothing, conciliatory style, but to someone very much in the mold of the president himself, or perhaps with very close ties to him. That is the lesson of the forest, and of the round leaved sundew.

As for the Democrats, no such forest clue emerges. They are in the woods, cold, tired, wet, and scared, unsure of their compass, desperate for someone to lead them out of the wilderness.