Let the voting begin

For everyone who dreams of becoming President: It starts with hard work.

For those who begin the choosing of a president: This process, too, starts with hard work.

From pancake breakfasts to chili suppers, in Rotary clubs and union halls, they sit at folding table snad listen. Sometimes they ask questions. They are as inscrutable as a jury working its way through a complicated securities case. No one, not every they, can say exactly what they are looking for, what they are thinking.

The American presidential nominating process marches through cities and states like a parade, from Des Moines to Nashua to Spartanburg, S.C., and then, step by step, across the country. At the end of each stop there is a single moment of intimacy: IN the voting booth there are only two people, the voter and candidate. And what brings them together is, like most relationships, a mystery.

Voters themselves can't easily explain why they make the choices they make. Avril Chase of Des Moines envisions the Democratic contenders each taking the stage with George W. Bush. But she can't quite articulate what she wants to see there. Jackie Hall of Des Moines, who seeks to judge a candidate's morality, picks pieces of their resumes and imagines certain moments of their l8ives. but to paint a picture of them at those moments she draws on an intuition deep inside her; she can't quite describe what she sees.

By the end of a presidential campaign, when politics becomes history, the choices that get made in the voting booth take on an air of inevitability. Presidencies become validated by events, and their selections then seem a matter of destiny: Failed Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln stepped out of the heartland to win the presidency on the eve of the greatest crisis in American history. He saved the union. Franklin D. Roosevelt came along during the Depression, seemingly because the times demanded someone like Roosevelt, a purveyor of hope to lift the nation's spirits.

But it's not quite right to suggest that the people and the times combine to create a president who fits the unique demands of the moment. Sometimes the opposite is true. Many of history's great turning points seem to lack any such synchronicity of man and country and events.

Woodrow Wilson scratched his way to reelection in 1916 by promising to stay out of the war in Europe; he joined the war, anyway, and ended it as a key architect of a peace plan so breathtaking in its ambition -- and so troublesome in its implementation -- that it helps define conflicts today from Iraq to Africa to Russia. It's hard to say whether Wilson's presence on the world stage was a matter of destiny or merely chance. Or perhaps some combination of both?

The 2000 election, in which the victor lost the popular vote and the electoral count fell into dispute, should be proof enough to convince the public that fortune, as much as destiny, governs the electoral process. But it's still not that simple. There are enough variables and vagaries and quirks in the nominating process to make even a landslide seem like an accident; and yet there are so many tests, each as different as the places that hold primaries, as to make even the most disputed vote proof of legitimacy.

Tomorrow, the first votes are cast in Iowa church halls and courthouses through a once-friendly caucus process that is suddenly straining to accommodate the ambitions of nine candidates. Then, eight days later, comes the traditional first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire. All week the contenders will be greeting voters, from the Merrimack Restaurant in Manchester to the Portsmouth Elks Club and the economically jeopardized paper mill in Berlin.

Then, like the "Return of the King" expanding from a few cinemas to every multiplex in America, the primaries will spread quickly across the land. Feb. 3 will bring South Carolina, Arizona, and five more states. This year's "Super Tuesday" will come just four weeks later, when 11 states, including such giants as California and Texas, will vote. Massachusetts also makes its choice then.

Sooner or later during the process, one candidate will accumulate the most delegates and secure the nomination.

On July 26, the Democratic Party will convene at the FleetCenter in Boston to officially anoint its nominee. The campaign between the Democratic nominee and President Bush will begin in earnest on Labor Day.

Votes will be tallied on Nov. 2.

On Jan. 20, 2005, the president will take office.

And sometime in the summer of 2007, a candidate will rent a storefront on Manchester's Elm Street, and the process will begin anew.

PETER S. CANELLOS