THE NATION : Oh, No, the Permanent Campaign Is Already Upon Us!

This is ridiculous. It’s not even Labor Day, and there are “Reelect Clinton the Crime-Fighter”’ ads all over the TV. Federal Election Commission papers filed this week showed he has spent $3.3 million already.

It’s not even Labor Day of election year. There are 510 punditting days to go before the next chance to throw the rascals in or out, and there’s not a sow left unstroked in Iowa, not a New Hampshire resident dare venture out before being tackled by four contending pollsters.

It’s the round-the-clock conservative prelims of Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.)-Patrick J. Buchanan shrilling in unison “I’m farther to the right of Genghis Khan than you are.”

It’s Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) telling us he’ll be Ronald Reagan if we want. He’s already spent $5.2 million this year to persuade us he ought to be the next President. And if the new Oliver Stone movie “Nixon” is a hit, Dole can go back to being the corn-fed Richard M. Nixon he always was.

It’s Lamar Alexander in a plaid shirt walking across yet another state. His shoe-leather test has now become an unfailing sign that an election is upon us. Last year, Alexander just drove across America. That didn’t count.

It’s town-meeting time again in New Hampshire, where Norman Rockwell’s warming vision of a homely democracy has already been CNN-ed to death by Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich on their best, bipartisan behavior.

It’s the quadrennial Jesse Jackson tease of option examining, and the public wrestling match between his conscience and his party loyalty that gets him back into the public eye. Every four years, we can set our clocks by this one.

It’s California Gov. Pete Wilson still talking--though his doctors begged him to stop. It’s this decent and fair-minded mayor who tried to make San Diego a model of multiculturalism now foaming about “the deadly virus of tribalism” as he bids for the anti-immigrant vote.

The shameless spectacle is with us once more. But this time, it is hideously early, so early that a goodly fraction of these new jobs showing up on the non-farm payroll are probably being hired by the campaign consultants and pollsters.

And if we had any lingering doubts that the rascals are after our votes again, here is Ross Perot convening what my invitation calls “The Political Event of the Century,” and Gingrich will join all of the above in telling us why.

There are two reasons to be sure this is genuine. First, this is Perot, because the organizers are demanding $135 registration fee--even from the media. Second, Ross is scheduled for “Larry King Live” on Aug. 3 and Aug. 9. Now, one appearance is just the usual ego trip. Two a week means it’s election time.

The business of America is on hold, as Republican candidates posture and sabotage each other’s bills to woo the Christian coalition, or the tough-on-welfare brigade, or the anti-abortionists or the gun lobby. The transparently decent Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr. saw his chance of becoming surgeon general fall victim to Gramm’s need to placate pro-life groups.

The business of the presidency is on hold, as the Republicans mount double-barreled hearings on Waco and Whitewater. Yes, we need to get to the bottom of this, but it takes an extraordinary innocence to assume the Republicans are not equally intent on chipping away at the President’s credibility.

The Republicans cannot agree on a welfare bill, as the leaders dither between requiring its recipients to work, or requiring them not to get pregnant, or just handing the whole mess to the states.

The “contract with America” looks tattered now that it has gone from the House to be caught in the Senate’s GOP wars. The balanced-budget amendment has sunk and the promised bonfire of regulations looks too damp to ignite.

The conventional wisdom says this is the fault of the new front-loaded primary process. We used to have a presidential-year timetable as predictable as the baseball season. The Iowa caucus gave way to the New Hampshire primary in February. Then the South’s Super Tuesday in March, followed by Michigan and Illinois and New York and Pennsylvania in April, ending with California in June.

This used to mean California was the decider. Back in 1968, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had a serious chance to take the Democratic nomination after he won the California primary. He had only entered the race in March, but that California victory would have changed everything, until Sirhan Sirhan gunned him down with the victory speech still ringing through the halls.

But after 1972, California no longer had the deciding role in the primaries. And certainly that feeling of California trailing in the primary dust inspired the state to leapfrog toward the front of the line with a new primary date of March 26.

But that, in turn, inspired the new race of the states to bring forward all their dates to the manic month of March.

On the latest schedule, California trails again. New Hampshire keeps the poll position (Feb. 20), followed by Arizona seven days later. Then comes South Carolina (March 3), Georgia (March 5), New York (March 7) and Texas and Florida and most of the South (March 12). On March 19, we get the Rust Belt primary with Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan all thumbing their noses at California on March. 26.

We should know the presidential candidates by April Fool’s Day--an apt date. What little suspense remains depends on Perot, Jackson and maybe Colin L. Powell as third-party possibilities.

Consider what this portends for the eight months from April 1 to the election. Usually, enlivened by primaries, the spring will instead feature real combat. Forget a Rose Garden strategy--where an incumbent President calmly governs while his rivals gnaw one another’s vitals in the time they dare spare from working the phones for campaign funds.

It will be hand-to-hand combat all summer long between President and challenger. Only one miracle can save us, the failure of a Dole or Powell or whoever to emerge as the clear primary winner in the monstrous month of March.

This is the dream scenario of a junkie for old-fashioned American democracy. Dole takes New Hampshire. Gramm takes the South. Buchanan gets New York, and enough crossover votes to share the Rust Belt primaries with Dole. Wilson sweeps California, and we all head for that grand old American tradition of the brokered party convention.

It won’t happen. But the fun lies in the way we have to go back to June 12, 1920, for a precedent. The GOP convention was deadlocked between Gen. Leonard Wood and Gov. Frank Lowden of Illinois. But as the Associated Press finally reported, and created an American cliche: “Harding of Ohio was chosen by a group of men in a smoke-filled room early today as Republican candidate for President.”

Little else may enliven next summer’s political longueurs after this front-loading. But rather than blame the primary process--and California’s attempt to get ahead of it--there may be another culprit.

Once again, we have to go back to the 1920s, and the first real public image adviser, Edward L. Bernays. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays exploited his uncle’s psychological insights to found the public-relations industry and became the first presidential media adviser: He told Calvin Coolidge to smile.

As Sidney Blumenthal describes the Bernays effect in his book “The Permanent Campaign,” the professional consultants slowly took over from the parties as the permanent political Establishment.

Their livelihoods and ability to deliver victory without reliance on mass parties depended on their skills at using the media and the pageantry of campaigning. The techniques were perfected by Reagan. And we now see the permanent campaign’s logical consequence: the permanent negative campaign--which Bill Clinton is the victim of.

The overall result is less a political process than a uniquely American pathology. A British general election takes three weeks. A French presidential election lasts, at most, three months.

Only America subjects itself to this unending orgy of politicking, to the fund-raising that never stops, to the Sunday morning talk shows that go from reporting the last election to predicting the next one. And they wonder why only half the potential voters turn out.

There is one consolation. Political journalists are racking up those frequent-flyer miles again, and getting reacquainted with the world beyond the Beltway. Maybe this time, we’ll be able to report that we’ve worn out the shoe leather and asked the people, and concluded that no one really cares to be bothered this early. But if we conclude Americans do care so soon, then they deserve the permanent election they are getting.