I have made attempts of late to extract myself from the tyranny of the urgent, at least urgent politics, and I will do my best not to post anything – save this one – on the presidential election until it’s over. I am convinced that we’ve all become so entrenched in some unwinnable (there! I said unwinnable!) culture war between Left and Right that we have lost our ability to take a longer view of things. So, that leaves a lot of conservatives rooting rather halfheartedly for a Republican ticket that is simply not compelling (despite a really quite reinvigorating Palin debate performance) and seems a far remove from the classic conservatism of Burke and Kirk. But they must root for these people, because they’d rather them win than them other people. And it leaves Bill and Hillary Clinton halfheartedly rooting for Obama, because they really don’t think he’d make a very good president, but they’d rather have him win than them other folks. There’s a fair share of folks who could stand up and say precisely what they believe about X or Y candidate, but they do not, because they don’t want to help out the other team.

It’s all very silly.

Another silly element to all this is how everyone seems to be saying This Is The Most Important Election in American History. This piece from The American Scholar explains why this is really a quite ignorant thing to say, if history is any precedent.

Consider, if you will, the 1924 contest between President Calvin Coolidge (Republican) and challenger John W. Davis (Democrat). Would the Jazz Age have turned out much differently if Davis had won instead of Coolidge? Few historians have lost sleep over the question. Yet Joseph Levenson, a New York Republican leader, announced [in 1924], “I look upon the coming election as the most important in the history of this country since the Civil War.”

But don’t everybody say that?  Biden said it last night.  At least Palin didn’t.