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From a media perspective, there's something different about this cam-paign. It's not in the news coverage per se or in the pundits' chatter. It's in the way two of the remaining presidential candidates have emerged through the media, and the qualities we seem to be rewarding this time around.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain are "cool" media figures. I don't mean cool as others have been applying the word to Obama, meaning unflappable or self-possessed. Nor do I mean hip or happening.

I mean "cool" in the way that philosopher Marshall McLuhan used the term, to describe different kinds of media. To McLuhan, a cool media experience was one that does not overwhelm the senses; it leaves room for the audience to fill in or complete the picture. A hot medium, in contrast, crowds the brain with information and sensations; it allows little audience participation or completion.

For the past 20 years, we've grown used to "hot" political discourse: intense, tightly packaged, screen-filling campaigns that felt like juggernauts. The Bush and Clinton dynasties epitomized "hot" in the way they used language, imagery, and ideas. Guided by such hot-media specialists as Lee Atwater, James Carville, Karl Rove, and Mark Penn, their campaigns have relied on highly charged images, loaded buzz-phrases, finger-wagging didacticism, and ideological trench warfare. The entire Bush-Clinton era has been explosively, relentlessly hot. Think Willie Horton. "Read my lips: no new taxes." "It's the economy, stupid." The "vast right-wing conspiracy." Swift Boating. "Axis of evil."

McCain and Obama are different media types. Although I'm not sure that either has a placid personality (McCain's temper is notorious), thus far each has played, in his own way, a very cool media game. Obama's persona is so cool it borders on the passive. He seems not so much above the fray as indifferent to it. Disdaining the hard specificity of bullet points, his rhetoric is a kind of elegant, dream-inducing fog -- the nouvelle vague of modern politics.

As the primary season has progressed, Obama has occasionally hotted up his statements. But this was often in response to heat-seeking gambits emanating from somewhere on the Clinton side, such as the Somali-garb photo. With Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign still kicking, there will be more of these. Still, the prevailing impression Obama leaves is a decidedly cool one. Even the "O" in his campaign logo projects open-endedness, a sense that the picture has not been filled in. Thus, in The Globe and Mail of Toronto (where McLuhan lived and worked), columnist John Doyle recently wrote of Obama as the incarnation of McLuhanesque cool.

But it's not just Obama. McCain, through his relatively soft-spoken manner and his complex, hard-to-pigeonhole stands over the years, invites us to participate in the task of figuring out who he is, to complete him. Where a hot candidate seeks definition above all, a cool one evades it. The way McCain responded to a radio host's repeated use of the phrase "Barack Hussein Obama" at a campaign event -- he disowned it, and apologized -- was cool telling hot to get lost.

Over the last few decades, the media got used to the hot game and assumed it was the only way to win. And at certain points last year, the press wrote off McCain and Obama. Other candidates with hotter personas -- Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Clinton, John Edwards -- seemed far surer bets.

Yet, somehow, two cool candidates rose. Why? It may have something to do with the way that digital technology has altered the media landscape, giving voters endless options. As a result, the public now has a greater sense of participation in the vetting of candidates, and perhaps, a preference for those who seem to invite voters in. Maybe cool is more in keeping with a YouTube world.

Whatever the reason, journalists stand to profit from the shift. As McLuhan noted, back in the 1920s the press didn't call Calvin Coolidge "cool" just because of his name. He was a diffident man with an indistinct persona, and reporters enjoyed this because "it compelled the participation of the press in filling in an image of him for the public."

In the coming general election, the campaign could easily shift into hot mode, as the stakes rise and the candidates get desperate. Get 'em while they're cool.