Another season of superlatives

"... [T]he most important election in a generation... "

I could've plucked that line from places other than a Tim Pawlenty fund-raising e-mail Tuesday, or deduced it from a Joe Biden comment this week, or a Barack Obama speech from 2008, or in sundry other forms in sundry other elections over the past few hundred years.

It is what politicians and their minions tell us every October of every election season, and it now seems as regular and as mundane as the World Series. And while some election sometime may indeed have been that important, this one isn't it.

How do I know that? I don't, at least not really. Nobody does. And nobody will for a very long time, just as they won't know whether Obama's 2008 election was "important" or merely historic, just as we won't be able to accurately weigh the successes and failures of George W. Bush's presidential tenure until its effects play out.

But my lack of certainty is certainly not shared widely among the chattering classes, which have spent the past few months telling us that this is the most important election of our time, if our time doesn't include 2008 anymore. I have to admit, it does seem like an age ago.

It's unclear to me why it is so important to politicians that any election be the most important ever or in a generation. But it is.

Maybe it's American punditry's penchant for hyperbole, particularly in politics and particularly since the self-important boomers were born.

Maybe it's the fact that campaign operatives - like weird vampires - feed on enthusiasm, even when they gin it up themselves.

Maybe it's that nobody wants to be part of the second most important election, not to mention the 50th or the 500th.

And maybe, just maybe, it's because politicians have outsized egos that lead them to believe that their campaigns really are the most important ever.

Can you blame them? America is the land of superlatives (I almost wrote that it was "a" land of superlatives, but that would've been less than superlative). We embrace and have unshakable confidence in a kind of exceptionalism that you take exception to at your peril: "What do you mean Virginia isn't the greatest state in America?"

The problem, of course, comes because Texans believe the same thing, misguided though they might be. Don't even get me started on Californians.

The other problem is that while we still have history books, they now apparently include some "untrue facts," which ordinary people call "made up stuff." You can find a lot of such things on the Internet, including that two battalions of black soldiers fought under Stonewall Jackson, a "fact" that undoubtedly came as a surprise to Stonewall Jackson, who I heard on a Web site is enjoying his dotage on a horse farm near Lexington.

As a people - and I say this as one superlative American to another - we're missing something less certain people call "perspective."

Surprisingly, sometimes what's in front of us RIGHT NOW is not actually the most important thing in the world. Sometimes, politics won't change the planet, or the nation, or even our particular corner of it.

We forget that in 1980, America elected its first modern conservative president. Or that in 1936, the nation endorsed Franklin Delano Roosevelt's plans for the New Deal. Or that in 1960, the nation selected its first Catholic president in its first TV-driven campaign. (Not to mention the elections that gave us guys like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln.)

Ranked against such competition, this is another midterm election in which another president will lose control of Congress. It has happened before, and it will no doubt happen again. Some folks will cheer, some will cry.

This isn't to say that the decisions we make Tuesday aren't important. They are. They reflect our confidence in individuals to make good decisions. They reflect our values and our hopes.

But they always do. And they're always important.

Donald Luzzatto is The Virginian-Pilot's editorial page editor. E-mail: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.