Tom Vilsack and Joe Biden are running.

Russ Feingold and Mark Warner aren’t.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain are “still thinking about it.”

Ready or not, the 2008 presidential race has begun, and it promises to be one of the most dynamic in history. With Dubya term-limited and Dick Cheney going home, the coming election will be the first in 80 years in which neither the president nor vice-president is running.

Without an heir apparent, each party’s primary should be wide open, making predictions this early especially difficult. With freshly inflated confidence, however — my column last week called the winner in each of the ten closest Senate elections — I will tell you over the next couple weeks how I expect those races to shape up.

Let’s begin this week with the GOP:

It stands to reason that, having recently lost both houses of Congress, chastened Republican voters will ask themselves one question above all others when sizing up potential nominees: Will he win? (PC disclaimer: I use the pronoun he because no female Republican, including Condi Rice, has expressed any interest in running.)

Appropriately enough, the two men who consistently top the ’08 polls are America’s two favorite Republicans, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain.

Though Giuliani leads slightly in most of these, McCain is considered the frontrunner — and for good reason. While both men have developed reputations for political moderation, Giuliani’s liberal views on abortion and gay rights — not to mention his messy personal life — are unlikely to escape the notice of the increasingly religious Republican base.

John McCain is no darling of the religious right, either. In 2000, at the heat of his primary battle with George Bush, the Arizona senator famously called evangelical icons Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance.” He has also angered many conservative Christians with his support for embryonic stem-cell research (though, unlike Giuliani, he is pro-life). In anticipation of his 2008 run, however, McCain has mended fences with many evangelical leaders, even accepting an invitation last year to be the commencement speaker at Falwell’s own Liberty University. True, most evangelical Republicans will never adore McCain as they do the current president; but if they sufficiently fear the second coming of a President Clinton and think McCain has the best shot at preventing that, they may vote for the moderate but palatable Arizona senator.

Evangelicals, however, are not the only conservative Republicans who may be loath to support McCain. The political maverick has angered libertarian conservatives, economic conservatives, military conservatives and cultural conservatives, respectively, with his stances on campaign-finance reform (he co-wrote McCain-Feingold), tax cuts (he voted against both of Bush’s), torture (he led the call to ban it in the War on Terror) and immigration (he supports a bill that many say amounts to “amnesty” for illegal aliens).

McCain is also not getting any younger. By Election Day, he will have turned 72 (Reagan was 69 when he took office).

Presidential primaries are governed by market forces of supply and demand. With McCain the frontrunner, there will be ample demand for a younger, more conservative alternative to McCain — the only question is who.

With the self-destruction and ultimate defeat of Virginia Senator George Allen, previously considered the likely anti-McCain, the conservative generating the most buzz is Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

Having elected not to seek a second term — a smart move, given what befell Republicans last week — the telegenic Romney will depart his job with an impressive record. In four years, Romney turned a 3-billion dollar deficit into a 500-million dollar surplus without raising taxes and signed into law a market-based universal health-care plan that he crafted with the state’s Democratic legislature.

On paper and in person, Romney looks like a golden nominee, but he, too, has an Achilles’ Heel. He’s a Mormon — the splinter sect of Christianity that many Catholics and Protestants alike consider a cult. Romney has done his best to play his faith off, joking to Republican audiences that, though his state was the first to legalize same-sex marriage, “in my church, marriage is between a man and a woman … and a woman and a woman.” If evangelicals have reservations about Romney’s Mormonism, they may just turn to an ordained Baptist minister who has also held Bill Clinton’s old job for the past decade.

Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has performed impressively on the job, last year being named by Time Magazine as one of “America’s 5 best governors.” He also has a compelling personal story, having lost over 100 pounds after being diagnosed with Diabetes in 2003. That might sound frivolous, but when the name of the game is geting noticed, it pays to have the most interesting stump speech (Remember John Edwards’s mill-worker father?)

McCain, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee — those are the Republican names you’ll likely hear the most between now and 2008. Others will surface, of course: Senators Chuck Hagel and Sam Brownback, Representatives Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo, New York Governor George Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have all expressed interest.

Gingrich will make a few waves if he runs — the former Speaker remains the most successful leader of the conservative movement since Reagan — but risk-averse (i.e. most) Republican primary voters will steer clear of this polarizing, albeit articulate, conservative icon.

The others, for a variety of reasons, are unlikely to make more than a few splashes: Frist is widely seen as a lightweight who underperformed expectations in his four years as majority leader; Pataki has Giuliani’s social liberalism without his star power; Hunter and Tancredo are lowly representatives and, thus, automatic longshots; and neither Hagel nor Brownback has the charisma to win a primary race, much less a general election.

Smart money says there’s at least a 90 percent chance that the Republican nominee will be McCain, Giuliani, Romney, or Huckabee; at least a 70 percent chance that it’ll be McCain or Romney; and at least a 50 percent chance that it’ll be McCain.

Whether the Republican nominee wins will depend on whom the Democrats put up. Can anyone steal Hillary’s thunder? Hint: His name rhymes with “Osama.”

Ben Birnbaum is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at bhb9@cornell.edu. Infomaniacs Anonymous appears Tuesdays.