1) Historic sweep (and snarky voice): As Obama saw it, the conservative tide in America was ebbing, and voters were turning away from the Republican Party. People were sick of politicians of the standard variety and yearned for someone new—truly new and different. Another politician with a superb sense of timing, Bill Clinton, perfectly understood why Obama saw a golden, possibly once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity. The former president believed that the mainstream press, whose liberal guilt Clinton understood and had exploited from time to time, would act as Obama’s personal chauffeur on the long journey ahead. “If somebody pulled up a Rolls-Royce to me and said, ‘Get in’,” Clinton liked to say, with admiration and maybe a little envy, “I’d get in it, too.”

2) Self-examination: Obama was something unusual in a politician: genuinely self-aware. In late May 2007, he had stumbled through a couple of early debates and was feeling uncertain about what he called his “uneven” performance. “Part of it is psychological,” he told his aides. “I’m still wrapping my head around doing this in a way that I think the other candidates just aren’t. There’s a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.”

3) An eye for tragedy: Crisis, chaos, deceit and subterfuge. After eight years in the Clinton White House, it was all familiar to Hillary—a world she had bravely struggled in but not against; it was the only world she really knew.

The Newsweek stories are fantastic. Catnip for the political junkie. I expect they’ll draw some minor enduring interest as part of the historical record.

But they don’t really offer any sort of literary thematics. I’m engrossed by them, but not particularly ennobled or enlightened.

What do you think?

Newsmaven, I think it’s near-certain that the surfeit of information contributes to the heightened sense of drama. It’s also key to recognize that the falling threshold for high-profile stories has actually affected those stories. That is, while we may not have heard much about Ashley Todd, Bristol Palin or Joe Wurzelbacher in years prior, the essential nature of their stories is affected by the fact that we are hearing about them this year.

Tim, I love the idea of framing the year that way. I think that also sort of underscores my point, and this speaks to Howard’s response: that would be a classically novelistic framing. In order for the retelling to cohere nearly as richly it did in real life, I think a novelist would necessarily have to tell that particular story, emphasizing a singular theme (and hitting grace notes where possible on others).

Part of what makes 2008 such a compelling and knotty storytelling problem to me is the collision of themes rather than their coincidence. I’ve been asking myself these questions for a few months now (there’s still a draft post from April [!] somewhere in the guts of Snarkmarket called “The Mythic and the Media”), and the novel was my first conclusion as well, Howard. The format performs wonderfully when an author can elegantly juxtapose several key themes and a few iconic characters along a unifying narrative thread. E.g. Moby Dick, propelled by the drama of an obsessive captain pursuing a monstrous whale, elegantly refracts the central themes of conquest and revenge into stories about race, religion, empire and exploration.

But even if we were to agree that the novel is fluid and robust enough to handle this story well, I’m still incredibly curious what shape the story takes. I just can’t think of a novel or series of novels that take on the particular challenges of a tale like this. (I’ve never read the Baroque Cycle; might that give me a clue?) I find myself working through the question this way:

The web of divergent narratives really make this story interesting. So the most obvious core thread would be a classic hero’s journey, built around Obama’s quest for the Presidency. But you have to somehow embed that within a snapshot of the Civil Rights Movement, as three sub-movements — racial equality, gender equality and sexual orientation equality — find themselves somewhat at odds with each other, a giant story in itself. Plus, you need to incorporate the story of the Democratic Party’s resurrection, not to mention the corollary disintegration of what had seemed to be an ascendant GOP movement. And to lend the quest story some heft, authors typically evoke a parable about the allure of power and its capacity to corrupt, which might actually best be illustrated by the drama of the Bush Presidency and the campaign of his would-be successor, who transformed from railing against that corruption eight years ago to exemplifying it today, if you ask Joe Klein. My sentences are already recursing, and we’ve just touched the surface of the politics. We haven’t even gotten to the financial crisis or the two wars, which would be lame, if you were really talking about America in 2008.

Musing on character for a moment, I think monomyths typically take iconic characters, riven by some essential inner struggle (e.g. Frodo). Realist epics, on the other hand, seem to take complex characters with penetrating inner lives (a la Raskolnikov). Most of our characters in his drama would seem to merit the latter mold, but the events themselves seem best suited to the former. Plus, there are so many deeply complex and interesting characters in this drama that they would threaten to crowd either type of epic. At a minimum, you’ve got to do a deep and thorough job of portraying Barack and Michelle Obama, John and Cindy McCain, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and possibly Sarah Palin. But you’d be remiss to neglect Ron Paul, Mark Penn, Mark Salter, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Steve Schmidt, John and Elizabeth Edwards, David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Patty Solis-Doyle, Jeremiah Wright, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, Dick Cheney, David Petraeus, and Nouri al-Maliki, among others. And then, for the full effect, you want Joe the Plumber, Bill Ayers, Colin Powell, the Kennedys, Ashley Todd, Joe Lieberman, Tom Daschle, I could go on. (And the year’s not over yet. In the past week, Rahm Emanuel got added to the list.)

Character complexity to me suggests play, but even Angels in America has only eight major characters, if you’re generous.

If it sounds like I’m obsessing over a Quixotic quest to re-render reality, well, welcome to my world.

I can’t think of any other election where the health of the participants, where the image of a hospital bed, mattered more.

Sure, you might begin with the purple heart band-aids of 2004. But then think of John McCain’s broken arms, the injuries he suffered trying to commit suicide. Think of his melanoma, that sheaf of records scanned in an instant. Think of his first wife and her car accident, left disabled and eventually alone.

Think of Joe Biden’s first wife and his children, their car accident. Think of his aneurysm. Think of Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer, their son who died. Think of Sarah Palin’s pregnancy, the amniocentesis, that crazy childbirth. Think of Barack Obama’s mother, his grandmother.

You have scene after scene of amazing personal material. Weave in the stories of everyday Americans, soldiers and workers and retirees, and the policy issues at stake, and you have the makings of a drama (film or stageplay) with a genuine Kushnerian sweep.

I suppose it’s possible it could be a play, if you had Shakespeare or Tony Kushner to write it.