"My God ... it's full of stars."
- Dave Bowman, 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

As I pondered my last post, I realized that never before has the term "presidential race" been more appropriate - and, more importantly, never before has it been a race quite like this.

Granted, we've been building up to this type of race for a while now, but when you contrast what presidential races were at the start of my life against what they've become since, the gradual evolution appears to be more of a revolutionary paradigm shift.

Back when Ronald Reagan ran for office, presidential elections were like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome - Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves - and part of the reason why Reagan won by such landslide margins was because his force of personality was so overpowering that it made his opponents seem, not merely like they were hopelessly outclassed, but more like they hadn't even bothered to show up. In 1980 and 1984, how many memorable catchphrases were spawned by the election? By my count, two. Reagan himself got off one - "There you go again ..." - which I believe he was able to use against both Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, to equally devastating effect, but I can't even credit Mondale with the second one - "Where's the beef?" - because all he did was lift it from Wendy's commercials at the time. That's right; of the only two truly memorable catchphrases in those eight years' worth of presidential elections, one was first uttered by Clara Peller. For as historically significant as Geraldine Ferraro's nomination as the Democratic vice presidential candidate was, she ultimately played an arguably less memorable role than perennial spoiler Jesse Jackson.

And from 1996 until 2008, the presidential races might have cast their spotlights a bit broader, but the focus was nonetheless firmly fixed on the two guys going at it for the top job. 1996 was Bill Clinton Versus Bob Dole, except that Dole proved to be so inept at campaigning that it actually wound up being Bill Clinton Sits It Out And Watches Bob Dole Versus Bob Dole. And for as much drama as was spawned by Florida in 2000, and while Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney each scored a moderate amount of ink in the press, 90 percent of that race was Al Gore Versus George W. Bush - which, in a weirdly parallel reversal of 1996, amounted to Al Gore Versus Al Gore, since Clinton's Teflon charisma guaranteed that Gore would receive heat from the voters for Clinton's bad behavior, even though none of it was Gore's fault, simply because even a lot of the people who disliked Clinton's behavior still liked Clinton's personality better than they liked Gore's. As for 2004 ... well, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, this was yet another race in which a two-man contest was turned into a one-man-versus-himself contest, thanks to the Swift Boat attacks turning John Kerry's greatest strength - his stint in Vietnam - into his greatest weakness. The only reason John Edwards was able to make a credible bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 was precisely because he was such a non-memorable non-entity in 2004 that Cheney was able to stay out of the spotlight, even in the wake of their VP debate.

1988 and 1992 were notable exceptions to this otherwise uninterrupted streak of man-to-man, relatively catchphrase-free presidential races. The closest we'd come to a memorable catchphrase from 1996 until 2008 was Bush branding Kerry a "flip-flopper" in 2004. Even 1988 offered a more memorable catchphrase, when Lloyd Bentsen earned his (literal) 15 minutes of fame by telling Dan Quayle, "You're no Jack Kennedy." That being said, the fact that this was the best line of that entire race says a lot. 1988 was, for the most part, still mainly concerned with its presidential candidates, but George H.W. Bush actually wound up naming what amounted to two running mates - for his own running mate, Bush chose Quayle, whose tendency to offer stunningly ill-advised misstatements made him an instant celebrity, and for Michael Dukakis' running mate, Bush chose Willie Horton, who not only negated the damage done to the Bush campaign by Quayle, but also made catchphrases largely unnecessary, since Horton's Big Scary Blackness appealed to the impulses of a viscerally post-verbal segment of the electorate. Quayle and Horton weren't merely Walk-On Cameos, as Ferraro and Jackson had been during the Reagan years; they were bona fide Special Guest-Stars, who boosted the ratings of that race.

Of course, this was nothing when compared to 1992, the presidential race that began with Pat Buchanan and ended with H. Ross Perot. This was a first in presidential election history, an honest-to-God three-way race in which all three presidential candidates were treated with equal weight by the media. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that this race spawned roughly three times the number of memorable catchphrases as any one race from 1980 until 2008 - Bush's "Read my lips - no new taxes," Clinton's "I didn't inhale," and James Carville's "It's the economy, stupid." Once you factor in how much Buchanan forced Bush to veer harder right, energizing the conservative base while alienating moderate voters, and how much Hillary Clinton's stridently expressed feminism alienated its own share of the electorate, AND how much the increasingly infamous Quayle was dragging down the Bush ticket, 1992 was goddamn near a sitcom-sized ensemble cast.

But compared to 2008, 1992 might as well have been a monologue on a bare stage. In How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock is fond of riffing on the literary theories of Harold Bloom to consider "the anxiety of influence" - that is to say, in extremely dumbed-down terms, the idea that strong narratives almost can't help but react to past works, and to characters and stories that have come before. In 2008, we're seeing, in real life, the anxiety of no less than 28 years of influence. John McCain is the candidate, not only of the party of George W. Bush, the incumbent of the White House for the past eight years, but also of the party of George H.W. Bush, who was vice president for eight years of his own, during Reagan's two terms in the Oval Office, before becoming president for a single term. Barack Obama won the Democratic presidential nomination by defeating Hillary Clinton, who was first lady during Bill Clinton's own two terms as president, and Edwards, who was the vice presidential nominee on Kerry's 2004 ticket. Moreover, the Democratic Party's unprecedented drive to win this year is being fueled by their lingering sense of having been "robbed" in both 2000 and 2004, and in our current economic crisis, we're seeing the end result of deregulation begun by Reagan in 1980, and aided and abetted, without interruption, by two Bushes and a Clinton in the nearly 30 years since. This is, in short, an election year that's practically choking on the anxiety of influence.

So, in both of our main players, we're seeing tiebacks to nearly 30 years of influence, which renews the relevance of all of those former players, in effect turning this race into a nostalgic Cast Reunion - and that's before you even factor in Obama being attacked for his supposed "associations" with figures like William Ayers, who belonged to the Weathermen nearly 40 years ago - and yet, somehow, against all odds, this year's presidential race has managed to bring on board just as many brand new players, as well. Following the George H.W. Bush playbook, McCain has made most of these additions to our collective consciousness, from Sarah, Todd and Bristol Palin to "Joe the Plumber," and the end result is a cast of characters so huge and sprawling that even a decades-long daytime soap opera would struggle to contain them all. In any other election year, either Obama or McCain would be able to claim THE Definitive American Life Story - either the troubled young black man who became a respected Harvard law professor, or the Vietnam veteran who endured five years of torture for his country - and yet, somehow, in this election year, two equally extraordinary men have managed to be overshadowed by the madcap circuses of personalities surrounding them.

This is the first Reality TV presidential race in world history.

This will be the first presidential election in which significant portions of the vote are being swung by Internet memes.

If this election had its own news network, it would be YouTube.

If this election had a soundtrack, it would consist entirely of DragonForce's songs for Guitar Hero.

If this election had a script, it would be written by LOLCATS and 4chan.

This is no longer Thunderdome.

If this is a race, then it's the real-life version of Hanna-Barbera's Wacky Races, complete with Sarah Palin playing Muttley to McCain's Dick Dastardly, by constantly snickering behind his back whenever his schemes inevitably go wrong.

This is the most insanely fucked-up series of events I have witnessed in my 33 years of life.

It is, literally, Pure Chaos.

And that makes it the most beautiful, wonderful thing that I have ever seen.

"My God ... it's full of stars."

...And he has favoured me with a couple of videos of Palin in interviews and speeches.