et's see if I've got this right:
The Democrats have a candidate attempting to come from behind in Iowa with an unprecedented investment in television commercials.
The Republicans have followed a trend toward taxes as the defining topic in a conservative party. There are several competitors for the position of truest believer, but one candidate has a habit of straying from orthodoxy and even a tendency to be (dare one utter the feared word) bipartisan.
In the horse race-fixated press, there is no dearth of conflicting certainty about the outcome of the two races, but there is an intriguing absence of a clear front-runner in New Hampshire - one jurisdiction that has had in-depth exposure to them. Important uncertainties also remain about about the other one, here in Iowa.
And of course, let's not forget that we have a vice president, an effective partner in a successful administration, who has yet to hit it off definitively with the prospective voters from his own party and faces an even steeper hill with a general voting public possibly looking for change.
I'm thinking, of course, about 1988.
The Democratic candidate was Dick Gephardt; the Republican vulnerable to the accusation of believing in responsible governance was Bob Dole; and the vice president widely viewed as vulnerable was George Bush.
All analogies eventually teeter and fall, but this one - between unstable campaign atmospheres, uncertain trends, tactical gambles, even debates over orthodoxy - is worth holding onto because of an additional element that is truly defining: 1988 and 2000 were years in which the presidency was an open seat.
That fact changes the nature of the game. When the presidency is open, everything is up for grabs. The essence of the campaign becomes an attempt to answer the question of how we move on. Naturally, when the options are various forms of continuity clashing with various forms of change, a dose of volatility is injected into the atmosphere.
There's more. In modern times - post-World War II - open presidencies have been relatively rare. Before this year there were four: 1988; 1968, a unique time of domestic and international strife; 1960; and 1952. Against those, our collective memory includes nine presidential elections with an incumbent on the ballot. And open seats in a competitive climate, even with front-runners and top tiers, produce more wide-open, weird campaigns, a historical fact that counts triple where the presidency is concerned.
Open seats have also followed important stretches of time. The one in 1952 came as an unprecedented 20-year New Deal era was ending; the other three wound up eight-year incumbencies - Eisenhower, Kennedy-Johnson, and Reagan. This year caps another, Bill Clinton's, which was not exactly a quiet time no matter your point of view. Quite apart from the opportunity an open seat creates, we should expect campaigns to decide what is on the next page after chapters like these to be harder to figure.
And there's more. It may not be front and center in any voter's brain, but in the background of this year's election is the fact that no matter how it comes out, the result is certain to go against the historical grain.
For starters, consider the implications of Bill Bradley's run at Al Gore. If his ship were to come in, a Bradley nomination would produce the first general election in 48 years in which neither an incumbent president nor vice president was on the ballot.
And the actual defeat of an incumbent vice president for nomination to succeed his president is essentially without precedent in modern times. It is true that an aging Alben Barkley hung around in '52 and would have liked the nod from Truman or the Democratic convention, but he didn't compete in any of the handful of primaries held in those days.
But keep going. If Gore prevails through November, his election would represent only the third occasion in our current electoral system of president-vice president tickets on which a veep was elected to succeed his president (Bush in '88 and Martin van Buren in 1836; each lost reelection in bad economies).
And a Republican victory would be just as weird by historical standards. At least in this century, good times have consistently kept the in party in control of the White House. Only in the assasination and war craziness of 1968 could you find an exception, and even there the clouds portending economic trouble were clearly present.
So it makes all the sense in the world for campaign 2000 to pull people in different directions, to produce wide swings in sentiment, and to be subject to odd goings-on.
Even with an attractive alternative, Democrats will not find it easy to dump their vice president. And no matter who the Republican is, the country will not find it easy to change parties during record prosperity.
But something very unusual is about to happen. And that makes the best advice before we start counting noses in two weeks to buckle your seat belt.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
