One of the ways to gain insight into politics is to track the creation or exploitation of icons. In this respect, politics is a bit like religion, for there is real power in making new imagery or motivating others through old imagery.

Right now – admittedly, very early in the presidential-election cycle – the Republicans are bereft of imagery, while the Democrats are swimming in it. Last week, for example, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Mrs. Clinton’s husband spoke often as president of the “bridge to the 21st century.” This was most decidedly a bridge back to the 20th century.

But Sens. Obama and Clinton both made the journey to Alabama because they wanted to harness the symbolism of Selma, where so important a part of the story of the civil-rights conflict occurred in 1965. They were paying homage, to be sure, but they also were seeking to identify themselves with a struggle that seems so much bigger than the one they are engaged in today for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge is but one of the icons the Democrats are drawing on in this year before actual voters make their selections for president. They also are drawing on other icons of the 1960s – icons that, until the Iraq conflict gave new breath to the anti-war movement, seldom redounded to the Democrats’ favor. Indeed, for many Democrats, the 1960s had become a (purposely) forgotten decade, even as the Republicans delighted in attributing the excesses of that period, so soaked in myth, to their rivals.

No longer. The Democrats’ effort to shut off funding to the Iraq war has its antecedents in the Vietnam period, when anti-war Democrats sought to do the very same thing. (The Democrats 2.0 learned an important lesson from their predecessors, however. They ritualistically invoke their devotion to the troops even as they pillory the commander in chief.) Suddenly the anti-war passion of the 1960s is an icon the Democrats are eager to summon, not a burden they are forced to bear.

Last week’s death of Thomas F. Eagleton, the heroic Missouri Democrat who spent 18 years in the Senate but only 18 days as the Democrats’ 1972 vice presidential nominee, oddly breathed new life into the recollections of the quixotic, bungled debacle of the George S. McGovern presidential campaign. The obituaries noted Mr. Eagleton’s struggle with depression and the politically fatal revelation that he had undergone shock treatment, but the senator’s death also revitalized memories of Mr. McGovern’s doomed “Come home, America” campaign.

No Democrat is running as a McGovernite this year. The term is still one of opprobrium, blind to the South Dakota senator’s splendid record as a World War II fighter pilot with the 14th Air Force’s Tiger Shark squadron and his indefatigable efforts with his co-conspirator Bob Dole, no wild liberal, to fight hunger. But suddenly there is life in the old stories (never told in the Reagan and Bush 41 years, and absolutely verboten in the Clinton period) about how the people and their politician allies fought a war against a war they didn’t want to fight.

What is even more striking in this period is how impoverished the Republicans seem of icons for the times. This is not always a disadvantage, of course; lacking icons in 1976 and 1980, the Reagan forces created their own, and today no one would argue that Ronald Reagan isn’t as potent a political icon as there is on the American scene, with the possible exception of Reagan’s own boyhood hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

So it was especially striking to read the other day that when the Republican front-runner, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, appeared before the true believers of the ideology that is today identified with his party, he chose a Reagan quote that was quite remarkably un-Reaganistic. Speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Giuliani sought to make a virtue of the fact that he is not exactly Mr. Conservative, a title that has its own iconography (see Goldwater, Barry).

“Ronald Reagan used to say, ‘My 80 percent ally is not my 20 percent enemy,'” Mr. Giuliani told the conservative activists, who never embraced the aphorism from Reagan and weren’t about to do so for a former mayor of New York who has been married three times and has supported abortion rights and gun control.

The Republicans have a serious icon deficit. They cannot summon imagery of the last Republican president to brave his way through an unpopular war, because Richard M. Nixon’s name is still mud as a result of his Watergate-inspired resignation, and his ideology is still questionable because of its Disraeli-style “liberalism” (see Environmental Protection Agency, formation of; and wage and price controls, imposition of).

None of the Republicans had the wit to show up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and that’s a pity, given the role the old Republican Party, and Sen. Everett Dirksen in particular, played in passing the Civil Rights Act a year before Selma. Didn’t anyone else notice that Mr. Obama sits in the very Senate seat that Dirksen once occupied, and that the young Hillary Clinton, a self-proclaimed “Goldwater Girl,” would surely have supported Dirksen, who served in the Senate from 1951 to 1969?

The closest any Republican has come to seizing an icon is Sen. John S. McCain III of Arizona, who has taken Barry Goldwater (see Mr. Conservative, above) as his hero. The two men have much in common, including an irascibility that has few peers in the Senate and an unpredictability that transforms friends into foes and vice versa in a moment’s stormy notice. But in his glory, Goldwater had few friends on the other side of the aisle (notable exception: Sen. John F. Kennedy, D-Mass.), and in truth many, if not most, of Mr. McCain’s allies are not exactly conservative fellow travelers.

So it is somehow ironic, and maybe even somewhat telling, that some aspects of McGovernism are making a sentimental comeback, at least among some Democrats, while Goldwaterism still lacks a real champion among Republicans. The commentators often say that money is the first primary. Maybe. But surely icons are the second primary, and right now the Democrats have a wagonload and the Republicans have none.