This Is (Not) the Most Important Election Ever

Even though everybody always seems to think so:

The most egregious example of Most Important Election of the current cycle is Newt Gingrich, who would frequently state, and even tweet, that the 2012 election is "the most important election since 1860." That's a pretty novel approach to the [X] in the equation, as customarily the amount of time since the last Important Election occurred ranges from "a generation" to "our lifetime" on up to "in history," but then again Gingrich cites historical dates like a kid with a new thesaurus drops big words. And Gingrich was not alone. Politicians and pundits including Bill O'Reilly, Nancy Pelosi, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santorum (parroting Gingrich), Chuck Norris, Reince Priebus, Bobby Jindal, Ramesh Ponnuru and even Bob Grant (remember him?) have also jumped on the Most Important boat. If volume is the determining factor, we are picking importance out of our teeth already and Election Day and we haven't even had the first debate.

It's one of the clichés of every election cycle, and a tired phrase that is generously allowed innumerable reappearances each time. In a 2008 essay chronicling its history of abuse and overuse, Christopher Clausen asked if it was possible for the US to elect a president without invoking the phrase. He asked, "Has there ever been an election that some people didn't narcissistically proclaim the most important in their lifetimes? Perhaps, but such episodes are evidently so rare that they never get recorded."