The race for the Democratic presidential nomination has become rather like the contest for control of the House of Representatives during recent election cycles, at least in this respect:

The two candidates are neck-and-neck, both with a plausible shot at winning the nomination. Similarly, the 1994 Republican Revolution opened an epoch in which either party could seize the majority. (It looks as though the Democrats will stay in charge in the next Congress, but that doesn’t undermine the broad thesis that neither side will any longer assume it has a lock on Capitol Hill.)

For the past decade and a half, both have understood that they had a real shot at power, and so neither contented itself
with perennial minority status, as was once the case. With everything to fight for, the parties fought (and still fight) over everything. This is one of the causes of the partisanship bemoaned by so many of Washington’s old hands.

Although, in consequence, lawmakers are likely to find themselves treated rudely in congressional elections, it also means that they will be treated with great solicitousness in the context of the presidential cycle. White House candidates woo them assiduously.

That is what is happening now in the Senate. There are 54 senators who have not endorsed a presidential candidate, 51 if you exclude the candidates themselves, Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Those 51 are being treated with the utmost courtesy and respect. When Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) told The Hill’s reporter J. Taylor Rushing, on the eve of Tuesday’s Potomac Primary, that he was “getting a lot of interest,” it was surely an understatement.

Endorsements are usually hyped beyond their worth, although their worth is hard to determine. This newspaper, like many others, treated it as big news when Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) endorsed Obama.

But the endorsement did not stop Obama from losing the Massachusetts primary to Clinton. Still, it surely added to the Obama campaign’s momentum.

Either way, the Democratic contest is so closely fought that neither candidate will spend much time parsing the merits of
each endorsement; they will, rather, take what they can get, seizing on any lawmaker who seems within reach and suggesting that he or she is the most precious of possible supporters.

Members of Congress may have achieved record low esteem in the eyes of the public, but to the White House hopefuls they are golden.