[Photo from NY Mag]

Kurt Anderson is a favorite writer of ours.  When we saw his new article in this week's NY Magazine on this year's presidential election titled "Anatomy of a Freak Show.  (Romney + Huckabee)/0 + .01 McCain + ?Giuliani = Bush. And some other things we've learned about this long, strange race" , we knew we were in for an interesting take on the issue.  In it he lays out 10 statements as to why this race is such a unique one, our favorites included:

•  The Candidates are all Freaks: "We've never had an election where the serious contenders were such imporbable outliers. All but one of those with any chance of being elected would be the first of their kind- First Female, African-American, Italian-American, Mormon, or ecclesiastic president. (And Bloomberg, of course would be first Jew.)"
• The two explosively contentious issues that were supposed to drive this election are so last year: Those of course being Iraq and illegal immigration.
• Where is George Bush? No one is calling themselves a "Bush Republican"
• "Blue" and "Red" just might be blending into a healthier purple muddle: "Every candidate with any prayer of being president is, for better and for worse, ideologically flexible."
• The Election narrative is a Möbius strip: "All the twists and turns notwithstanding, it seems that we're in a closed loop, where at the end we find ourselves exactly where we started."

• It's about character-that is cynicicsm and pandering and phoniness versus candor and complexity and nobility. A topic that serves as a whole chapter in Microtrends.

Things are going to be very interesting this November....