The worst of them read like an Election Edition Mad Libs, and even the best of them tell, with rare exception, the same Jacksonian story: scrappy maverick who splits rails and farms peanuts and shoots moose battles from the log cabin to the White House by dint of grit, smarts, stubbornness, and love of country.
"The idea of elections is mad," says Cedric Barnes of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank.
Finally, because special elections are usually mad dashes to fill vacant seats, organization plays a key role.
lost his Republican primary election, setting off a mad dash for his job as House Majority Leader, one thing has become clear: The real challenge for GOP lawmakers won't be replacing Cantor, but agreeing on who gets another top job opening up in the party's leadership.
8.08pm: Patrick Barkham has written this entertaining piece about how Britain has gone betting mad on this election.
"I believe in the word of God," he said after his election, "I am just not mad about it".
Related: The Tory economic plan is NOT working, at all - sadly, their PR war is Jabbing his fingers to make his point, Cameron told the rally: "Do you know what drives me so mad in this election?
You're scrunched in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a lot of people are mad about the election, you've got people voting on critical issues who are going to be gone in two weeks, and they're always ugly".
If it's not scrapped, one explained, and there's another messy election, "people will just get mad again and go home and beat up their wife and kids......
We booked that interview with Mad!' " This presidential election will go down as the one in which the pop-culture pander reached its ludicrous apotheosis and we were asked to believe things even more fantastical than a revenue-neutral 20-percent cut in marginal tax rates.
