ST. PAUL, Minn. -- So it's come to this. You can spend the better part of an hour with Al Franken and hardly laugh at all.
PITTSBURGH -- In all of the sunshine fun and seaspray of summer, the small celebration being conducted along the eastern spine of Pittsburgh on Sunday (June 29) will attract scant attention. Highway rededications are small, fleeting events. There will be speeches that soon will be forgotten, and commemorative coins, and a military jet fly-over. Then there will be a bicycle race.
With the nomination fights over but the conventions not yet called to order, political attention naturally falls on a post that, in most administrations, gets no attention whatsoever.
This is shaping up as quite a presidential election: a close campaign taking on the trappings of what generals call "total war."
While commentators and political professionals are re-running the 1988 campaign (soft liberal Democrat gets shellacked by tough Republican) and the 1992 campaign (weak economy dooms Republican), let's break from the pack and instead look at what the 1968 election might teach us about the 2008 contest.