It’s not the economy.

That may sound like an unusual way to begin an every-other-week column on economics and politics, but this is a pretty unusual election. Questions of prosperity and the health of the economy, which usually are at the top of the list of voters’ concerns and often play a huge role in determining the outcome — Exhibit A: Bill Clinton in 1992; Exhibit B: Ronald Reagan in 1980; Exhibit C: just about every other election in recent memory — are clearly overshadowed by the war in Iraq. The nearest parallel to today is 1968, when the Vietnam War similarly overwhelmed every other issue.

Now, from the admittedly parochial point of view of those of us who closely follow economic developments, this would seem to be a fairly dispiriting turn of events. Sure, many Americans are worried about everything from high gasoline prices to the cost and availability of health insurance to the widening disparities in incomes. Still, if the economy doesn’t much matter to the voting public right now, isn’t all the attention paid to it mostly hot air?

But this lack of focus on the current state of the economy could actually prove to be a good thing. That’s because American presidents, for all their efforts to claim credit for a growing economy or avoid blame for a slump, don’t really have much influence over such ups and downs. Almost none, in fact.

Yet the tendency to attribute such God-like powers to the occupant of the White House obscures what Washington can actually do to improve the way the economy performs over the longer run. And it masks what is at stake once the election is over and the process of governing begins, when attention turns mostly to rewarding favored constituencies and leaving others to fend for themselves.