Over the next two years, we’ll talk a lot about how organization and money establish who wins votes or how the Internet hijacks the process. Forget about it, the Boston Phoenix asserts: presidential politics conforms to a small number of rules that don’t much change from one campaign year to the next, and Rule #1 is the simplest of all:

Ideas. Win. Campaigns.

Sure, a winning campaign benefits from lots of things, from a ton of money and good press to a successful strategy. We’ve already watched Joe Biden implode, and we look forward to John McCain losing his temper in public for the first time.

But by focusing such heavily on these things, the media tends to overlook what a successful candidate needs above all: a central vision. A compelling idea.

In the end, voters don’t really care which organizers the candidates hire in New Hampshire; they care about where the prospective leaders promise to take the United States of America.

An idea is not a platform or a collection of boring policy proposals, or a bunch of ambiguous positions (cough, John Kerry).

Rather, it’s a broad animating concept that voters can rally around.

John Kennedy inspired America by proclaiming “It’s Time to Get This Country Moving Again.” After Watergate and Vietnam, Jimmy Carter reminded us that it needed a complete Washington outsider at the reins of government. Bill Clinton understood that a new Democratic Party needed to re-establish its appeal to the average voters - and that it was the economy (stupid) that mattered most to them.

This year, a lot of candidates have big ideas. As the first serious woman presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton will likely focus her campaign on the idea that a woman would be a very different and better type of leader than a man (whether Hillary represents that notion authentically is a different matter entirely, but that’s for another time).

Barack Obama, meanwhile, will undoubtedly articulate a similar vision from the perspective of race; he’s already begun to argue for a new beginning of partisan-free politics that could tie neatly into this theme.

The notion of the first female or black president is so powerful that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a fine candidate and himself the nation’s first credible Hispanic presidential aspirant, may have trouble getting traction just because he isn’t Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

The bottom line is that with Obama and Clinton in the race, the rest of the Democratic field better have big ideas of their own.

John Edwards, with his poverty-centered “two Americas” theme, has clearly given some thought to how he might compete with the front-runners , while the rest of the Democratic field doesn’t seem as prepared.

It’s an axiom of national politics that candidates who haven’t articulated big ideas before a presidential campaign are unlikely to be able to do it once the curtain goes up. That’s bad news for Biden, Christopher Dodd and the rest of the Democratic field.

On the GOP side, McCain argued effectively, in 2000, that he was independent enough to rise above politics — like a less-insane Ross Perot. But will that idea work in 2008, given that the country has grown more partisan, and, more importantly, he now seems less independent?

McCain may need a second act. Rudy Giuliani is still a national hero almost six years after 9/11 — a considerable feat — and it’s likely he’ll trumpet that theme and trying to convince Americans he can lead them the way he did New York City even in the most difficult circumstances.

The other GOP candidates have their work cut out for them. Mitt Romney, in particular, must learn that positioning ones self as the “right-wing” candidate hardly offers voters a compelling vision of the direction in which you will lead the country.

The leading non-candidate, former Vice President Al Gore - certainly has the biggest idea out there, and most likely the most important one, too. But, given that it can be so easily co-opted, is global warming even a presidential idea?

Obama, for instance, could call a press conference tomorrow and announce, “I commend Al Gore for everything he’s done on global warming and promise that in an Obama administration, he would be my climate adviser with my full backing to do whatever is necessary to solve this problem.”

That isn’t to say that Gore - if he does indeed run - can’t come up with another big idea. But it will likely have to be something different and more personal than global warming.

Something tapping into his years in the “wilderness” and how it has given him fresh insight into how to lead America. Maybe that would work. Until he does, though, it’s looking like there’s no stopping the Clinton-Obama express. Will anyone get the message to have a message?