Election season has already been rolling for months and the first primary is still almost six months away. (No, the very long campaigns are not the trend that I’m referring to.) With all that time to go through, there’s plenty of opportunity to get sick of things. One thing that I’m sick of is the attempts to predict the 2012 election based on comparisons to past elections.
It’s going to be a '92, where the incumbent’s reelection campaign is dragged down by a floundering economy. No, it’s going to be a '96, where the Democrat wins thanks to the backlash against Congressional Republican extremism. No, by golly, it will be an '80, where the Democratic incumbent gets attacked by a rabbit.
The problem is that the over-reliance on metaphorical comparisons to past elections accomplishes nothing. They may be vague similarities between this and any previous election, but nothing strong enough to tell us what to expect from the voters because the situations just aren’t similar enough. The problem, I think, is that writers of political columns have to keep churning stuff out, all through the two-year campaign, even on days when nothing is happening. The ‘compare this election to a previous one’ idea is enough to fill a column when one has nothing else to write about.