The 2007-2008 presidential election (it’s silly to confine the campaign to a single year) is just getting started.

For the political weary among us, this is a heartstopping statement. American voters have already experienced loads of candidate debates, hundreds of television advertisements and other amazingly lifelike moments scripted to push one of several candidates’ candidacy.

Yet it’s been the unanticipated story lines that have reverberated.

We’ve seen an “Obamanon” turn into “Obamamania,” one Republican candidate whose campaign flatlined then redlined, the other a bass-playing minister who wants to abolish the IRS, and a respected Democratic senator from New York whose bid is being derailed by the thing most politicians yearn for: name recognition.

And voters of all races, colors, creeds and stripes are turning out in droves.

Hollywood’s writers should have stayed on strike. There’s no way even their overactive imaginations could have conjured this political pseudo-reality.

By just getting started, we mean the deep thinking and soul searching about which person should be sworn as the 44th president of the United States of America, and what that man or woman must do to earn the illustrious office.

Our feeling is it’s something more transcendent than a health care plan, or economic policy, or immigration reform platform. The duty of the next president involves more than remaking America’s world image, or even bringing our troops home safe and sound.

There’s one quality the next president must bring to the office. It’s the key to every policy debate and struggle over issues, one touted as the ideal, yet wielded as a political weapon by ideologue charlatans who only want to destroy it.

It is bipartisanship. Unity. Cross-aisle cooperation, even if it means teeth-gritting collaboration, by ideologically differing representatives who understand investment into teamwork pays splendid returns of progress and goodwill.

The next president must, beyond all other specific duties, dissipate the atmosphere in Washington that has branded bipartisanship seemingly akin to high treason.

Why?

Voters demand it. A subtler groundswell of public exasperation about partisanship in 2006 has now erupted into powerful statements, within both parties. The hordes chanting “yes we can” behind Sen. Barack Obama demand it. The empowered base that keeps Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign moving demand it.

And Republican voters, who by elevating Sen. John McCain are rejecting a winning ideology that maintained White House residency for eight years, are demanding it.

In this campaign, money hasn’t mattered. Experience hasn’t mattered. Friends haven’t mattered; endorsements have proven near-worthless in the primaries and caucuses, so far. Policy hasn’t really mattered yet.

Message has mattered, and so has promise.

The party front-runners have been propelled by supporters who believe they can unlock bipartisanship and unity in Washington. Whichever is elected president must hold this key.