This does not feel like an election to me
This feels more like a time travel story... like Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder in reverse.
Some aberration caused this impossible deviation into a parallel world where Herman Cain can be the momentary front-runner, and a candidate can tell reporters to their face that he plans to lie to them and a candidate can rave like a cocaine fiend about the second coming. (And as as alternate universe bonus, the second coming in Missouri.)
It isn't like Mitt Romney was defeated. He was more negated—written out of history, somehow.
It was all so outlandish, but the national narrative has to make sense. The zeitgeist shares that thing we all have in our minds that narratives our experience to allow us to cope with it.
The zeitgeist-makers must bear the burden of cognitive dissonance. If Aquaman runs for president the media will have to make sense of it. Their function does not allow them to say, "I'm out. World makes no sense anymore," and drop the mike.
By even they find normalizing this last year too difficult. We, as a nation, are probably are going to pretend it never happened.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I kind of agree with the op here. The whole last two years have been absurd to a point where it's hard to believe.You spot on! 
I know everybody thought, "Well, bush* will end the decline for the obvious reason that NOBODY can be worse than that!" And then they found Rmoney. 
