Patrick Ruffini’s being kind to me, though I think not inaccurate, when he writes:

Professional political operatives and the online political class are slowly converging. I am on record as saying that in the closing days of the ‘04 election, guys like Geraghty, Jay Cost, and the RealClearPolitics team knew just as much about the state of the race as did I, a mid-level staffer in Bush-Cheney headquarters.

He and I also had a bit more of a back-and-forth about whether presidential candidates who have run for the office before are benefiting from their experience.

Part of the question is, does one count Hillary as a first-time candidate? I would chalk her up as a “veteran,” as she was obviously front and center for all of the ups and downs of 1992, and the… well, mostly ups for 1996. While Obama is gaining, Hillary remains the frontrunner, and she will not dislodge from that spot easily.

Edwards? Well, today’s news takes his established reputation and throws it up in the air; where it lands nobody knows. It seems hard to believe that today’s announcement won’t have a significant impact on how people feel about him. We might see a surge of sympathy, or primary voters may see him as a man with too much on his plate right now to be a serious candidate, and mentally “write him off.” But it seems safe to say he’s been running a consistent third.

Is Edwards running a better campaign than his 2004 effort? If I’m recalling correctly, he was actually in about this spot for much of 2003 – had potential, got a decent amount of applause in the debates, but he was usually behind Dean and Kerry. After Dean’s Iowa problems and his own impressive second-place finish, Edwards was catapulted to the top tier, one of the few remaining serious options to Kerry.

This time around, Edwards seems to know what he wants to offer primary voters – purity, the distilled essence of populist liberalism.

Yes, Obama is a first-timer who’s doing very well. Yes, second-timers Biden and Kucinch have yet to make an impact, but the odds were always stacked against them. Richardson and Dodd are first-timers who have yet to break out of single digits.

On the Republican side, Giuliani (Ruffini’s client) is a first-time candidate doing quite well. McCain is a second-timer, and he’s probably not doing as well as he had hoped, although it’s still early. While I like a lot of what his campaign is doing, first-timer Romney is still waiting to break out. Beyond that, it’s a small mob of first-timers like Brownback, Huckabee, Tancredo, Hunter, Gilmore. All of them faced an uphill climb, and are so far not getting much traction.

I think Patrick is right when he theorizes “something about the almost seamless transition from election cycle to election cycle is making people yearn for fresher candidates.” One of the criteria that I think helps a candidate at this historical moment is pointing to his accomplishments. The electorate is perfectly right to ask, “so what have you done with yourself since the last time you ran, besides appearing on cable news networks and giving speeches?” For the candidates who have spent the past few years… well, mostly campaigning, they pale in comparison to a guy who cleaned up New York City or established a mandatory health care plan in his state or what have you.