Sixteen years ago this week, the political world was aswirl with controversy.

The issue: whether Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, one of the “seven dwarfs” of the 1988 presidential campaign, had lifted part of his stump speech from British Labor leader Neil Kinnock.

Twelve years ago the political world was rocked again. The issue then: the admission of Gov. Bill Clinton, who had yet to declare his 1992 campaign for the White House, that he had strayed from his marriage vows in years past.

It’s the fall before the caucuses and primaries again, and what are the topics dominating the political class? Not indiscretion or infidelity. Instead, the candidates are wrangling over these questions: Is there a steady hand on the tiller of American foreign policy? Is the Pentagon structured for a world requiring both military power and police power? Can the country be made safe against the many outside threats it faces? Should the president’s tax cuts be repealed or rolled back?

This autumn period-before-the-storm has customarily been swallowed up with the ritual questions of integrity and character — central issues any time a mass democracy contemplates making a change in leadership, to be sure, but not questions of political policy or philosophy. This is a different election. The quaint examinations of a candidate’s past seem themselves a thing of the past. The issues this time are … issues.

That’s a fundamental shift in the timbre of our politics, and there are two explanations.

The first is that this is a dangerous time in our history; the times call for an unusually sober and deep examination of policy questions.

The second is that the process of picking a president has been “frontloaded” — the term political professionals employ when they mean that the pace of presidential politics has accelerated and that the Democrats’ 2004 nominee may be chosen earlier in the election year than ever before.

The engine of this election’s debate has been Howard Dean of Vermont, the mountain rebel who has galvanized opposition to President Bush and transformed what might have been a peripheral campaign into a pivotal one.

The challenge for Dean — who, like the only two Democrats to win the White House since Lyndon Johnson, is a former governor — is to maintain control of the movement he has created. That may not be easy.

In 1968, for example, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota created a formidable force out of the shards of the anti-Vietnam movement but wasn’t able to transform his achievement into the nomination. That prize, which might have gone to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York if he had not been assassinated, passed to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota.

In this campaign, hardly anyone is arguing that personality, or other candidates’ moral failures, have propelled Dean to a position where he leads Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of neighboring Missouri, the early favorite, in the Iowa caucuses, and where he is ahead of Sen. John F. Kerry of neighboring Massachusetts, also an early favorite, in the New Hampshire primary. Likely caucus-goers in Iowa and likely primary voters in New Hampshire are more liberal and more skeptical of Bush foreign policy than are Democrats in general — and far more so than voters in a general election. Dean knows his customer base.

Those customers have an urgency that, in a happy coincidence for Dean, matches the urgency inherent in a political race that will be over in a flash.

The first state primary, New Hampshire, is Jan. 27. That’s five weeks earlier than the first primary was in 1960. But more important, consider this: The second week of primaries in 2004 occurs seven days later, on Feb. 3. The second primary in 1960 didn’t occur until early April, in Wisconsin.

Or look at it this way: By March 9, 2004, 24 states will have held primaries. By that time in 1960, just tiny New Hampshire, which provided only 2 percent of the delegates required to win the nomination at the Los Angeles convention, had voted.

In every election but one since 1980, the Democrat who was ahead in the last national Gallup Poll before the Iowa caucuses won the party’s nomination, according to a new study. The exception explains nothing; it happened in 1988, when former Sen. Gary W. Hart of Colorado led the field only to withdraw in the wake of a sex imbroglio.

The 2004 campaign is occurring at an extraordinary juncture in American politics, where Democrats in Washington seem powerless to play the role of opposition to President Bush and the Republicans, and where Democrats outside the capital are eager to foment opposition to the president and the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill. That may bode ill for the slew of Democratic candidates whose identities and destinies are rooted in the Congress.

In the entire 20th century, the country elected only two presidents directly from the Congress. One of them, John F. Kennedy, was a fluke of destiny and determination; his election represented the selection of an idealistic, telegenic figure at the dawn of an era of idealism and television.

The other, Warren G. Harding, was a mistake born of desperation; months before the convention, his campaign manager, Harry Daugherty, said: “I don’t expect Sen. Harding to be nominated on the first, second or third ballot, but I think about 11 minutes after 2:00 on Friday morning of the convention, when 15 or 20 men, bleary-eyed and perspiring profusely from the heat, are sitting around a table, some of them will say: ‘Who will we nominate?’ At that decisive time the friends of Sen. Harding can suggest him.”

No such process in 2004. The Democrats are angry, they’re impatient, and every force in the campaign is pushing them to choose quickly. That’s why the rest of the candidates can’t afford to permit Dean to get too far too early.

David Shribman is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.