It’s so obvious to point out that so-called new media has made this an unprecedented election that it’s actually possible to think that it isn’t pointed out enough.

This afternoon, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School co-hosted a panel with Politico. The event’s title was the rather unspecific “Politics & the Media: Bridging the Political Divide in the 2008 Election.” And the discussion covered a lot of well-worn ground—how can newspapers be saved, what sort of advertising model might play a role, are partisan news outlets leading to greater polarization, can long form journalism survive online, etc.

But the thread of change brought on by new media was present throughout the discussion.

By way of illustrating what’s happened in the political and media establishments in less than a decade, former Bush and McCain media advisor Mark McKinnon pointed out that the Bush 2000 campaign didn’t even have Blackberries (though Gore did). Now, of course, anyone can testify that some form of wireless device is well past de rigeur for the handler and the hack. “It’s pretty radical to think about what’s happened,” McKinnon said, reminiscing that his 1999 media team had to physically ship VHS tapes to the candidate and his top aides campaigning on the road before getting approval. Now, the campaign can not only preview the ads digitally, but they can spread them via email and email forwarding to “18 million people in a matter of seconds.”

Another moment like that came during the Q&A portion of the panel, when Paul Sherman of Potomac Tech Wire asked the panelists what sites they read when they first turned on their computer each morning. I’ve posted the full list over at The Kicker, but the assembled mentioned a spade of reported blogs and content aggregators—Drudge, The Huffington Post, Marc Ambinder, NBC’s First Read, and so on. Again, nothing shocking. But then USC professor Geoffrey Cowan, moderator of the Q&A section, chimed in before moving on to the next question: “Almost none of the sites you all listed existed in the last election cycle.”

When asked to name the biggest effect that new media was having on the campaign, Roger Simon, Politico’s chief political columnist, quickly replied that it was “the speed at which things happen,” before offering up an anecdote he collected while reporting a long piece on the primaries. A Clinton aide told Simon that Bill Clinton wasn’t very helpful to the campaign, because he was “of a different era” and didn’t understand the 24-hour news cycle.

“When you think that Bill Clinton was president pretty recently, it shows you how fast things have accelerated. It shows you how political campaigns have had to adapt very quickly,” he said.

“What happened to these long magazine pieces where we would really examine the character of a presidential candidate? We’ve gone from Theodore White to Twitter,” quipped Fortune’s Nina Easton. “Now it’s very difficult to step back and write long form pieces.”

“No one reads them. It’s not water cooler conversation. The water cooler conversation is what happened in the last second,” she said.

“It seems like even five years ago if you had a hard-hitting, well-done piece that was on the front page of The New York Times or that led one of the major networks, it could have real resonance for days inside of a campaign. Whereas now, even really good high-quality journalism seems to just blow away in the wind, and campaigns are pretty adept at figuring out ways to make sure that it blows away,” said VandeHei.

McKinnon agreed. “Not only is there not much of it being done anymore, as the panel has pointed out, when it is done, it just sort of evaporates. I just think about big investigative stories that have been done over the course of the last couple of campaigns. I remember being in the campaign and being so worried about them, and then, twenty-four hours later, it was like it was months or years ago that it had happened.”

“Not to get into too much psychobabble, but it does feel like the human brain is almost being reprogrammed in real time in how it consumes information,” said VandeHei.

VandeHei asked McKinnon how campaigns could “exploit the new habits of the media” (which brought a sly grin to the consultant’s face), where commercials as soon as they are released will get distributed, instantly, at no cost to the campaigns, via the twenty-four hour cable networks and Web sites like Politico.

“It really has changed how we approach advertising in presidential political campaigns,” McKinnon said. “It got so absurd at the end of the last Kerry-Bush campaign, that I remember we would respond to some external news event at five in the morning, we’d figure out the news and then we’d write a spot, and we’d put out the script of the spot before we had actually had a spot. So reporters would respond to this ad that we’d ‘made’ that wasn’t even made yet. And then the Kerry campaign would respond with their own ad that they hadn’t made yet but had a script for. And a couple of hours later, we’d have the ads out, but it was all to drive the news cycle, and most of these ads never went on the air.”

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